Charlotte and Elizabeth: Guardians of the Female Mind in Pride and Prejudice

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s depiction of womanhood is both varied and expansive. A woman can be gentle in spirit, incapable of finding ill in others. Daughters can be impossibly “silly” in their romantic endeavors. Wives are sometimes obnoxious, meddling fools with easily disturbed nerves. Even women linked by their intelligence, such as Charlotte and Elizabeth, differ in terms of practicality and adherence to social norms.

Feminism in Austen’s Northanger Abbey

In the excerpt from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” she responds to Dr. John Gregory’s “A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters,” where he discusses his view of proper womanly behavior. Wollstonecraft echoes Austen’s view that women are individuals with intellectual and creative capacities equal to that of men’s.