Jane Austen
Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room.
Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own
You believe that we always act on our own account. That is a point on which men and women have long disagreed. Without intending to resolve it, I will say that there are circumstances that even women cannot control. A woman's ability to save may achieve many things, sir, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.
Jane Austen, Las Watson
The British writer Jane Austen developed her literary work in a context where the only possible aspiration for middle-class women was to find a good husband with a good income that would allow them to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
Being unable to inherit from their parents, their male siblings and, quite often, their distant cousins were the ones who kept the family wealth. That is why for many women of her time, the only possible horizon was to find a good husband. The beginning of Pride and Prejudice is well known, perhaps the author's most emblematic work: “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Austen herself was aware of the consequences of an inevitable marriage for women of her time -the risk of dying in childbirth was enormously high in the first half of the nineteenth century-, which is why she chose to remain single, canceling her engagement to the young Harris Big-Whiter.
Set during the Regency period in the United Kingdom, a time when England was beginning to recover from the horrors of the Napoleonic wars, the already universally famous heroines of Jane Austen - Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, sisters Eleanor and Margaret Dashwood, Anne Elliot, Fanny Price, and Catherine Morland - are strong women who seek to be protagonists of a story that condemned them to a secondary role.
Just as the Dashwood sisters manage to overcome the ups and downs they must endure after their father's death, Emma Woodhouse uses all her talent and charm to form couples among members of her social circle.
But of all her heroines, there is one that stands out from the rest, a character that seems to have been written by Austen with herself in mind. We are talking about Anne Elliot, who stars in Persuasion, a mature novel, the last complete work that Austen published.
Persuasion tells the story of Anne, a young woman who reunites with her beloved seven years after rejecting him for his low social status. Frederick Wentworth returns as Captain after having been rejected by Anne for being a mere sailor.
The novel concludes with the reconciliation of both characters, in an attempt by Austen to show us that part of maturing consists of correcting the mistakes of the past.
Although Jane Austen did not consider herself a feminist in the strict sense of the term, it is undeniable that she was one of the first writers to be internationally recognized. Her novels are among the first literary works starring women.
In the history of nineteenth-century literature, women were almost always represented as the romantic interest of the male protagonist. The men who wrote female characters often completely ignored what it meant to be a woman at that time.
But Austen's heroines are not just extraordinary women. Her novels show us that even the story of an ordinary woman deserves to be told, as demonstrated by the beginning of Northanger Abbey: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her to be born a heroine.”
Despite the antiquity of her novels, Jane Austen remains an undisputed reference for women today. Her stories show us that we can all be the protagonists of our own romantic novels.
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