On her deathbed, she gives her friend the following advice: “Run mad as often as you chuse but do not faint-,” a lesson that serves as the ironic moral of Laura’s tale (99).

As a consequence of having fainted repeatedly “in the open Air as the Dew was falling” (98), Sophia catches a cold, never to recover. The coup de grâce of Austen’s parody of the sentimental heroine occurs when Sophia’s acute sensitivity proves fatal. Laura explains that upon making this discovery, she and Sophia lose their senses: “Sophia fainting every moment and I running Mad as often” (96). The passengers, who lie “weltering in their blood,” are none other than Edward and Augustus. After they help her elope with a fortune hunter and are caught stealing banknotes, Macdonald sends them away.Īs the heroines sit by a stream, they witness a carriage overturning. After this providential reunion, the heroines proceed to the home of Sophia’s cousin, Macdonald, where they convince his daughter to break her engagement with a suitable young man, because “he had no soul” and his hair was not auburn (91). At an inn, Laura and Sophia meet an elderly gentleman who readily acknowledges both as his long-lost granddaughters. The death of Laura’s parents also affords Austen the opportunity of mocking the well-worn literary cliché whereby an orphaned heroine is discovered to be of high birth. With this fleeting remark, Austen exposes the hypocrisy of Laura, who, for all her tender sensibility, has little real compassion. Laura explains in passing that they could not take refuge with her parents, as they had died some time earlier. Laura and Sophia travel to Scotland to seek assistance from Sophia’s relations. The household is broken up when Augustus is sent to debtor’s prison and Edward disappears. Laura describes her first meeting with Sophia as follows: “We flew into each others arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Friendship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward Secrets of our Hearts-” (83–84). The second of these sentimental tropes is parodied again when Edward and Laura move in with Edward’s friend Augustus and his wife Sophia. This episode ridicules two conventions of sentimental fiction: the portrayal of tyrannical parental authority and the formation of sympathetic bonds between characters. Edward declares his passion for Laura, and they are married at once. The noble youth, named Edward, has run away from home because he scorns to marry the woman his father has chosen for him: “Never shall it be said that I obliged my Father” (79). The first incident in her story is the arrival of a mysterious young man at her parents’ cottage. By her own account, her only fl aw was a “sensibility too tremblingly alive” (76). Austen, making fun of the idealized heroines of romance, has Laura begin her narrative by describing how beautiful, accomplished, and virtuous she was at 18.

Jane austen love & friendship