Question

in northanger abby what are the wealth and status of the characters and how does it affect them as the story unfolds

Answer 1

Austen doesn't fit the Marxist world view. Wealth is not an important key to understanding her characters, and has no really important influence on their development, let alone the plot. She writes entirely about character, and its collisions with luck, both good and bad, and that is as true in her first novel (NA) as in any of the more well-known others.

She is, not course, above an acerbic comment or two about wealthy people who do not deserve what they have, or abuse it, but this is mere byplay, the way Shakespeare has some footsoldiers or servants make penis jokes in the first few lines of Act Two to revive the audience's general good humor.

Furthermore, her *characters* certainly obsess about wealth, the lack thereof, the chances for obtaining it, and so forth -- but that is simply because that was the reality of upper middle class English nubile female strivers in AD 1800. The fact that wealth is a topic in nearly every conversation Austen characters have is no more meaningful than that the characters in Richard III are always yammering about York and Lancaster, and the characters in Star Trek are often reversing the polarity of the transporter. It's just the flour out of which the cake is baked.

Whoever asked this question has a remarkably limited understanding of Austen, I think.