Feminist Jane Austen Quotes

More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—my old friends—with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn't seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn't allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with all the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf's wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying, "Write? What's the good of your writing?" but was instead saying "Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me.

...and I decide to stop inwardly composing the feminist world court's prosecutorial summation to the jury.

Jane Austen never married,” he said in frustration. “She entered the male-dominated field of novel writing and her female heroines are strong, independent characters. Just what do you imagine a feminist in a rural English village in the late eighteenth century looks like?

Scholars have glorified [Jane Austen] and patronized her, sometimes simultaneously. They have called her writing artless and instinctive or conscious and careful, labeled her a conservative or a subversive, a domesticated lady or an ardent feminist. They have burrowed beneath her seemingly placid surfaces to ferret out the sex and the politics.

As an aspect of Jane Austen's work ignored by the traditional critics (perhaps because they were mostly men and thought it too domestic, too mundane), the study of her treatment of food yields new insights into the skill with which she creates character and establishes her moral values. Equally, it can help us pose the feminist, political and ideological questions which, if not the sole purpose of literary criticism, certainly add something fresh and valuable to the discipline. For example, consideration of Fanny Price's 'niceness' as regards to eating makes some contribution to the political debate between whether the resolution to Mansfield Park most supports or subverts the dominant ideology within which it was created.

I wondered if the two mysteries—how Shakespeare wrote the works and why he wrote feminist drama—might share the same answer: that the author was not an uneducated man but an educated woman, concealing herself beneath a male name, as the heroines of the plays so often disguise themselves in masculine garb. Literary history is strewn with women whose authorship was hidden, even into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans); Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë); George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin); Jane Austen, whose name appeared only after her death.