Depreciation of women : a study in Austen's selected novels

Abstract EN

The first flowering of the English novel started in 1740 with the great novelists of the 18th century: Richardson, Fielding, Sterne and Smollest.

They used the novel to mention social and political issues, and psychological problems of the common man.

At the end of the 18th century, after their death, the English novel was in an ailing condition because its feeble period of 20 years in which only few forms of novel were written.

The only thing left was only to copy or imitate the masterpieces which were written by the previous great masters of the novel.

Jane Austen felt that she had a moral and social responsibility; therefore, she described the society as it was in order to make her readers realize the social injustice and denounce the evils of her time and the inadequate social system.

She was the last and the finest flower of that century.

Her fiction is as much steeped in irony, both in language and in situation.

Austen was profoundly moral.

She thought that the first duty of everyone was to be sincere, unselfish, and disinterested.

She succeeded admirably in expressing the gentler virtues of a civilized social order.

She could accurately perceive and fastfully portray a woman responses and conflicts within the circumscribed existence of a patriarchal society that exerted enormous social and economic pressure on her.