She has spent the last ten years in sadness and solitude, even in her own family. She could have had ten years of happiness and contentment had it not been for Lady Russell, who finally acknowledges she made a grave mistake when she gave Anne advice Continue Reading...
Monetary wealth is intimately aligned with social standing and when the Eliot's run into financial difficulties as result of pretentious living standards, this has profound implications for the plot and main characters. Power is also another factor Continue Reading...
Jane Austen's Emma Jane Austen's Gentleman Ideal in Emma In her third novel, Jane Austen created a flawed but sympathetic heroine in the young Emma Woodhouse. Widely considered her finest work, Austen's Emma once again deals with social mores, part Continue Reading...
Jane Austen's Persuasion: Anne Elliot's Coming Out The writings of Jane Austen are often considered to be the representation of an excessively conservative era. Though this may truly be the case especially in regards to the formal and informal intera Continue Reading...
Emma: The Character of Frank Churchill and 'reading' the moral qualities of men in Jane Austen One of the challenges posed by Jane Austen, of her heroine Emma Woodhouse, in the novel entitled Emma, is how Emma must learn to be a good reader of both Continue Reading...
This is a fact that Austen herself most certainly appreciated as an unmarried female of the same social set she was writing about, which explains the centrality of this concept to so many of her novels. Persuasion is far from the only Austen novel w Continue Reading...
Obedience in Jane Austen's Persuasion Is obedience a virtue or a vice? Actually, it can be either. As Shakespeare notes, "Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometime by action dignified" (2.3.21-22). This means that one can obey Continue Reading...
Feminist Reading of Austen's Persuasion "I Will Not Allow Books to Prove Anything": Women Reading and Women Writing in Austen's Persuasion Feminist criticism is equally concerned with female authorship and with female readership and in the case of Continue Reading...
The lack of rights within marriage that makes women basically "property" to the man is obviously central to this story, as indicated by the way in which Maria is imprisoned. There are a variety of ways in which this most disturbing of issues is add Continue Reading...
Thomas Hardy / Elizabeth Barrett Browning Considered purely as a poet, Thomas Hardy has earned the status of a Modernist, or at the very least an honorary Modernist. Claire Tomalin's recent biography of Hardy would have us believe that, in essence, Continue Reading...
English Class System Jane Austin's novel Persuasion, Director Michael Caton-Jones' movie Scandal, and T.W.C. Banning's Oxford History of Modern Europe each portray the English upper class and English class system in a largely unflattering manner. Pe Continue Reading...
