Traditional critics of Jane Austen's novels consider her fiction from the perspective of male literature, male social values, and male myths and assumptions about women. These critics often give excellent readings of Austen, but they mitigate their own best efforts by trying to separate her life from the fiction and the fiction from her awareness of women's predicament in society. In Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, Alison Sulloway offers a fresh and comprehensive vision of Austen as a moderate feminist. Her studies of the letters, fictional fragments, and minor works, as well as novels, reveal a systematic pattern of feminist plots, themes, motifs, and symbols. She traces the influence on Jane Austen of Anglican conduct literature in addition to the progressive novels written by such women writers as Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Austen's covert acknowledgment of the previously ignored "feminist revolt of the 1790s," Sulloway contends, accounts for the dammed-up energy behind her protective mask of irony. Sulloway perceives Austen and her heroines as survivors attempting to find decent solutions in a society whose owners and managers saw scant need to consider women's dignity. Her book is mediatory, just as Austen, that "provincial Christian gentlewomen," also mediated between the traditional forces of hostility toward women and the counter-forces of radical disruptions. Finally, Sulloway contends, the greatest beauty of Austen's fiction is not in her subtle depiction of the strains of eighteenth-­century womanhood but in a certain joy­—"Austenian joy"—that transcends grief and anger at various human abuses. More than stoic resolution, it is a comedic gift and a moral resilience that signifies grace under pressure. Sulloway com pares it to the instinctive courage of a soldier who rejoices when a single bird sings during a lull in the bombing. To read Jane Austen for this vision is to appreciate fully her gallant wit and her compassion. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood will benefit any Austen scholar as well as students and teachers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature.

Jane Austen has been one of the world's most popular writers for 200 years and is best known for her works Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility.

Jane Austen’s minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions inherent in the economic and moral value structures are exposed. Just as the newly-minted paper money was struggling to express its value, so do Austen’s minor female characters struggle to assert their intrinsic value within a marketplace that expresses their worth as bearers of dowries. Austen’s minor female characters expose the plight of women who settle for transactional marriages, become speculators and predators, or become superfluous women who have left the marriage market and battle for personal significance and existence. These characters illustrate the ambiguity of value within the marriage market economy, exposing women’s limited choices. This book employs a socio-historical framework, considering the rise of a competitive consumer economy juxtaposed with affective individualism.

The first full-length study of animals in Jane Austen, Barbara K. Seeber’s book situates the author’s work within the serious debates about human-animal relations that began in the eighteenth century and continued into Austen’s lifetime. Seeber shows that Austen’s writings consistently align the objectification of nature with that of women and that Austen associates the hunting, shooting, racing, and consuming of animals with the domination of women. Austen’s complicated depictions of the use and abuse of nature also challenge postcolonial readings that interpret, for example, Fanny Price’s rejoicing in nature as a celebration of England’s imperial power. In Austen, hunting and the owning of animals are markers of station and a prerogative of power over others, while her representation of the hierarchy of food, where meat occupies top position, is identified with a human-nature dualism that objectifies not only nature, but also the women who are expected to serve food to men. In placing Austen’s texts in the context of animal-rights arguments that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Seeber expands our understanding of Austen’s participation in significant societal concerns and makes an important contribution to animal, gender, food, and empire studies in the nineteenth century.

Jane Austen and Critical Theory is a collection of new essays that addresses the absence of critical theory in Austen studies—an absence that has limited the reach of Austen criticism. The collection brings together innovative scholars who ask new and challenging questions about the efficacy of Austen’s work. This volume confronts mythical understandings of Austen as "Dear Aunt Jane," the early twentieth-century legacy of Austen as a cultural salve, and the persistent habit of reading her works for advice or instruction. The authors pursue a diversity of methods, encourage us to build new kinds of relationships to Austen and her writings, and demonstrate how these relationships might generate new ideas and possibilities—ideas and possibilities that promise to expand the ways in which we deploy Austen. The book specifically reminds us of the vital importance of Austen and her fiction for central concerns of the humanities, including the place of the individual within civil society, the potential for new identities and communities, the urgency to address racial and sexual oppression, and the need to imagine more just futures. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

How do Austen's heroines find a way to prevail in their environments? How do they make the landscape work for them? In what ways does Austen herself use landscape to convey meaning? These are among the questions Barbara Britton Wenner asks as she explores

An original critical introduction to women characters in the novels of Jane Austen. Why does Jane Austen “mania” continue unabated in a postmodern world? How does the brilliant Regency novelist speak so personally to today’s women that they view her as their best friend? Jane Austen’s Womenanswers these questions by exploring Austen’s affirming yet challenging vision of both who her dynamic female characters are, and who they become. This important new work analyzes the heroines’ relationships to body, mind, spirit, environment, and society. It reveals how, despite a restrictive patriarchal culture, these women achieve greatness. In clear, lively prose, Kathleen Anderson shares original theoretical insights from twenty years of studying Austen, and illuminates the novels as guidebooks on how to become an Austenian heroine in one’s everyday life. This engaging book will appeal to a broad readership: the serious student, the general lit-lover, and the Austen neophyte alike. “Jane Austen’s Women examines aspects of Austen’s female characters in new ways. Anderson thoroughly and competently sifts through the many meanings of ‘womanhood’ in Austen’s time and, directly or by implication, in our own. It was a pleasure to read this delightful analysis accompanied by illuminating references to our own contemporary culture.” — Susan Ostrov Weisser, author of The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories “Jane Austen’s Women hits the sweet spot between delightful critical introduction and inspiring guidebook for how to live out Austen’s vision of what Kathleen Anderson calls ‘the heroinism of everyday life.’ Her discerning close readings of female bodies, emotions, intelligence, work, and love combine lucid interpretation with strong insight. This book will prompt readers of Austen, whether seasoned or beginning, to return to Austen’s novels with vital questions and renewed energy.” — Devoney Looser, author of The Making of Jane Austen

Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.

Written for readers at all levels, this book situates Jane Austen in her time, and for all times. It provides a biography; locates her work in the context of literary history and criticism; explores her fiction; and features an encyclopedic, readable resource on the people, places and things of relevance to Austen the person and writer. Details on family members, beaux, friends, national affairs, church and state politics, themes, tropes, and literary devices ground the reader in Austen's world. Appendices offer resources for further reading and consider the massive modern industry that has grown up around Austen and her works.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Jane Austen, arguably the most beloved of all English novelists, has been regarded both as a feminist ahead of her time and as a social conservative whose satiric comedies work to regulate rather than to liberate. Such viewpoints, however, do not take sufficient stock of the historical Austen, whose writings, as William Galperin shows, were more properly oppositional rather than either disciplinary or subversive. Reading the history of her novels' reception through other histories—literary, aesthetic, and social—The Historical Austen is a major reassessment of Jane Austen's achievement as well as a corrective to the historical Austen that abides in literary scholarship. In contrast to interpretations that stress the conservative aspects of the realistic tradition that Austen helped to codify, Galperin takes his lead from Austen's contemporaries, who were struck by her detailed attention to the dynamism of everyday life. Noting how the very act of reading demarcates an horizon of possibility at variance with the imperatives of plot and narrative authority, The Historical Austen sees Austen's development as operating in two registers. Although her writings appear to serve the interests of probability in representing "things as they are," they remain, as her contemporaries dubbed them, histories of the present, where reality and the prospect of change are continually intertwined. In a series of readings of the six completed novels, in addition to the epistolary Lady Susan and the uncompleted Sanditon, Galperin offers startling new interpretations of these texts, demonstrating the extraordinary awareness that Austen maintained not only with respect to her narrative practice—notably, free indirect discourse—but also with attention to the novel's function as a social and political instrument.