I shall support her (them) as long as I can

Jane Austen’s posthumous defense of women

Abstract

This essay analyzes selected excerpts from the novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, written by the English author Jane Austen and published in a combined edition after her death in 1817, to assess the same topic, the defense of women. In the first novel, Austen purposefully inserts herself into a literary tradition of women writers while carrying on her famous defense of the novel. However, her alignment is immediately erased in the biographical note composed by her brother Henry Austen to accompany the edition, an erasure later reinforced with the biography written by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh in 1870, both having a strong impact on the literary criticism of Austen’s work until the rise of feminist studies. In the second novel, Austen produces a comparison between her heroine, Anne Elliot, and the character of Captain Benwick to question the current conception of women as more physically and emotionally fragile than men and, therefore, more inconstant. We demonstrate, then, that the juxtaposition of two novels, written with a large interval of time between them, ends up illuminating a constant in Austen’s work: that women are at its center, despite their mistakes.