Jane Austen Research Paper

Several of Jane Austen’s novels feature characters who enjoy reading, and during Austen’s time period, the novel was a relatively new art form and did not receive the same mainstream respect as lyric or Romantic poetry, leading many of the time to believe that novels were reserved for the entertainment of young women. However, Jane Austen’s novels sought to disrupt this belief, instead acting as types of anti-romances that were meant to cure enraptured readers of their voracious, corrupting novel habit. In writing her social satire, Austen not only succeeded in creating novels that were subverting the literary norms of the form, but also proposed in her novels her own ideas about reading and her opinions on different types of literature. …show more content…
If the written word is respected as ultimately concealing or containing universal truths, it is important that these words are not only available to everyone, but also that all may have the same opportunity to produce them. Anne uses Captain Harville’s conviction on the subject to cleverly contradict him, suggesting that the songs and proverbs he read were not entirely accurate although they were written, because they were written by men and lacked a female perspective on man’s inconstancy, as Anne says, “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything” (Austen 188) In this, Austen not only links reading with a sense of obtaining truth or education, but also emphasizes and advocates for the greater education of women of the time, ensuring that they too may write literature that serves to educate and promote truth above all else. Ironically, in writing Persuasion, Austen contradicts her own heroine in a way, as it is Austen’s writing of Anne’s speech that allows her to prove, through the novel, that women, when given the opportunity to be educated and to record their thoughts and emotions like men, prove to be just as emotionally constant and intelligent as men. In this time, Anne believes women have no privilege over men except in their ability to care for them even if this love is no longer reciprocated, saying “All the privilege I claim for my own sex …is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone” (Austen 189). However, through reading, one hopes that young women would gain an education that would allow them to correct this misconception and exercise other privileges, telling of emotional constancy and their