<p>Jane Austen&#39;s six completed novels have long occupied a contested place in feminist literary criticism: read variously as conservative endorsements of Regency domestic ideology and as subtle, ironic critiques of the patriarchal marriage market that structured women&#39;s lives in early nineteenth-century England. This paper examines the feminist dimensions of Austen&#39;s fiction through a close reading of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey, situating the novels within the intellectual context of late eighteenth-century proto-feminist thought associated with Mary Wollstonecraft. Employing a qualitative, text-based methodology combining close reading with feminist narratology, the study argues that Austen&#39;s irony, her deployment of free indirect discourse, and her sustained attention to women&#39;s economic precarity constitute a coherent, if historically bounded, critique of gender relations. The paper further considers the limits of this critique, addressing scholarly debates over Austen&#39;s apparent conservatism, her silence on issues of empire and class beyond the gentry, and the ultimate containment of her heroines within the institution of marriage. The paper concludes that Austen&#39;s feminism is best understood not as a program of reform but as a mode of ironic consciousness that exposes the constructedness of gender roles even while working within their constraints.</p>