Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Novel of Manners - Depictions Of Gender

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DEPICTIONS OF GENDER

Patricia Beer

SOURCE: "Chapter III," in Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, Barnes & Noble Books, 1974, pp. 84-93.

[In the following excerpt, Beer compares Jane Austen's female characters with those of Charlotte Brontë, revealing the changing nature of women's relationship to work and to marriage in the first half of the nineteenth century.]

Between the publication of Jane Austen's Persuasion and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre great social changes occurred. They had begun in Jane Austen's time, of course, and she had apparently not taken much notice of them, but by 1847, the date of the publication of Jane Eyre, they could no longer be ignored and in any case Charlotte Brontë had no wish to ignore them. Mr Suckling's fling at the slave trade turned, with her, into serious author's comment.

In...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Social And Political Order
4. Domestic Order
5. Depictions Of Gender
6. The American Novel Of Manners
7. Further Reading
8. Copyright