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Gender Inequality In Jane Austen's Literature

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The hierarchy in the society between men and women is a pervasive reality. In the present time, when women’s equality is still a question, their condition in the past years is easily predictable. They were not accepted on par with men at any sphere of the society – be it social, religious, political or intellectual. Women were not considered intellectually creative, contributive and productive enough to have a say in their own lives. They did not have any identity of their own, they were known either by their father’s names or by their husband’s.
‘The female sphere’ – a woman’s proper place was the home, whether she ruled it as its mistress or laboured in it as a servant is a constant debate, but the latter seems to be more true. Genteel work …show more content…

At fourteen, she wrote Love And Friendship. During her life-time, she wrote many famous novels like – Sense and Sensibility (Eleaner and Marianne) (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816). Her novels mainly include the theme of marriage and family life. It is a well known fact that a person is valued only after his/her death. Same was the case with Jane Austen. Although she mirrored the society of the time and tried to represent women’s condition, she got reputation only after her …show more content…

The first among them is Mary Ann Evans, known as George Eliot (1819-1880). She combines in her writings two chief tendencies of the Victorian era: one, a strong intellectual tendency to analyse the problems of life; two, a tendency to teach, that is, to explain the method by which these problems can be solved. Her important works are – Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Ramola (1863), Middlemarch (1871-72). Andrew Sanders remarks; “George Eliot is the most earnestly imperative and the most probingly intelligent of the great mid-Victorian novelists.” (Sanders 447) Although she holds the highest rank in putting English novels at the top of the world’s fiction, the fact must not be discarded that it was due to certain restrictions on women at that time that she had to get her novels published under a masculine

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