ENG L332
Dr. Edwina Helton
26 June 2014
Jane Austen and Elizabeth Bennet: A Feminist Comparison of Real and Fictional Representations of Class and Marriage in Regency England Regency period England adopted many rules regarding social decorum that reflected a hierarchy of class and common beliefs about the inferiority of women. The accepted “natural order” of things regarded women as the weaker of the two sexes whom were incapable of making decisions of their own concerning their place in the social ranks as well as in marriage agreements. The real life of author Jane Austen and that of one of her most all-time beloved heroines, Elizabeth Bennett, bear striking resemblance to one another. Austen set her fictional novel, “Pride and Prejudice” in her modern day. Therefore, Austen’s life and social experiences were easily expressed and mirrored through her writing. This paper compares the author to that of her fictional counterpart in both their status of class and ideas and choices concerning marriage. Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Steventon, a small English village, to George and Cassandra Austen. Cassandra Austen was considered a part of aristocracy while her father George was a clergyman, a profession held in low-esteem, who was highly educated at prestigious, Oxford University. The family was considered to be professional working middle-class, however due to her mother’s familial connections the Austens were “linked, though tenuously in some ways, with the larger world of fashionable society and of patronage, politics, and state” (Kelly, n.d.). At a time when it was uncommon for women to be educated, let alone literate, Jane’s father encouraged her to read and write “within the walls of their household” (Jane Austen’s Life, n.d.). An educated Jane began writing novels when she was 15 years-old and had published by the age of 23. Austen frequently centered her novels in the direction of interactions of her characters from varied social classes. The author, noted as being “a keen observer of social class, [she] translated the life choices made by her family into the conflicts at the heart of her novels” (Jane Austen’s Life, n.d.)
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