Reason, Romance, and Resistance: Negotiating Female Agency in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice

The aim of this thesis is to examine how Jane Austen negotiates female agency through the interplay of reason, feeling, and social constraint in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). In particular, it explores how Austen’s heroines achieve agency through a disciplined balance between rational judgment and emotional intelligence. Situating Austen within late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates on Enlightenment rationality, the culture of sensibility, and ideals of female virtue, the study engages with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman alongside other relevant ideological critiques. The thesis further examines the social constraints women were required to navigate, especially those imposed by marriage, economic vulnerability, and social surveillance, and analyses how Austen, through wit and irony, critiques these limitations while proposing an alternative model of female agency embodied by her heroines. Through this analysis, Austen emerges as a novelist who challenges prevailing gender norms by articulating a vision of female autonomy grounded in a balance of reason and feeling.