Mansfield Park and True Friendship

I am sure there are not very many people who have read Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park," but as I finish it up for a literature class, I am struck by a very keen fact: the value and verity of friendship.
In the novel we have young Fanny taken into the home of her aunt and uncle to be raised in better circumstances than her own family's could afford. The only person truly considerate, kind, and a friend to her is her cousin Edmund.
Fanny falls in love with Edmund while he is fixed upon a Miss Crawford. Time goes by and Edmund is seeking to propose to Miss Crawford until a rash of incidents throws the family into distress and Miss Crawford exposes the lack of principle and morality that Fanny has seen almost from the beginning.
As Edmund suffers from the impropriety of his two sisters and the sickness of his elder brother, he cannot forget the pain so harshly felt under the reality of Miss Crawford's true character.
Ever has Edmund confided in Fanny, in spite of the pain it causes her, unknown to him, and it is the same at the end of his pursuit of Miss Crawford.
He relates the event and conversation that passed to reveal what he has been blinded to with a great deal of pain. Fanny, as ever, is sympathetic and tender as she listens to him and then cements what Edmund now realizes with her own knowledge of Miss Crawford's want of principles.
At the end of the second-to-last chapter where this revelation is revealed to Fanny, the despair and loss Edmund now feels at this blow to his love and desire for Miss Crawford, something becomes quite clear to both reader and Edmund: "Fanny's friendship was all that he had to cling to."
This seems to utterly typical of love stories where one person is in love while the other is completely ignorant of it and often in pursuit of another; all the while they confide in this person who secretly loves them and is coincidentally their best friend, never realizing the pain they cause to the one who is actually closest to them.
Yet, when their infatuation or fascination with the other person (so often not a good person, but somewhat different and intriguing it seems), they are back to where they were: with the person they care about the most and who cares about them the most.
This dedication speaks to me of selflessness, loyalty, and love tested through fires stoked by the object of their fealty.
It is the ones who stick with us through it all that have true merit. Those who never leave us and who can always be depended on, even though we may sometimes fail to see it or fail to realize it.
When all else fails, it is so very encouraging, poetic, and renewing to have someone to fall back upon. To be there to hold us together as we fall apart, to pick up the pieces shattered on the ground, and ever so gently, nurture and mend us back into one piece.