Jane Austen'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's lives in early nineteenth-century England. This paper examines the feminist dimensions of Austen'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's irony, her deployment of free indirect discourse, and her sustained attention to women'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'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'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.
Jane Austen; feminist literary criticism; free indirect discourse; marriage plot; Regency England; gender and irony; women's economic dependency.
Dr. Jyoti Dutt. Reclaiming the Marriage Plot: Feminist Perspectives in Jane Austen's Novels. Indian Journal of Modern Research and Reviews. 2026; 4(7):151-154
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