Reassessing Jane Austen's agenda: Understanding the anger in 'Sense and Sensibility', 'Pride and Prejudice', and 'Persuasion'

Few students escape high school without having read Pride and Prejudice; the vision most are given of Jane Austen is one of a content spinster (an image created by early biographers) or a heavily cloaked feminist (an image created and encouraged since the early seventies). Unfortunately, these visions fit Austen to theory, instead of fitting theory to Austen.;Perhaps another reassessment of Austen can help bring back her voice;A close reading of her works--from the first published Sense and Sensibility to the last published, Persuasion--suggests that Austen was hardly content. And while Austen agreed with some feminist arguments produced in her era, her pen showed a much wider scope. Throughout each of her novels, Austen took aim at the traditions of a gentle society that were weakening it from the inside--primogeniture and entailment, economically based marriages and gentry parenting that encouraged indolence and greed.