Jane Austen, Romantic Feminism, and Civil Society

In her novels, Jane Austen may seem to be reinforcing the societal norms of women’s roles of her time by showing women primarily in the domestic sphere. Many of her protagonists are almost entirely concerned with who and how they will marry. However, Gary Kelly argues that her writing was a form of feminism, not for now, but of the time at which she lived. He claims that, “she participated in a feminism conditioned by the circumstances of what has come to be called the Romantic period … this was the role of women in creating and sustaining civil society in the aftermath of a political, social, and cultural cataclysm” (Kelly 19).
The French Revolution had a massive impact on all of the Romantics. The influence it had over Austen that is reflected in her novels is that of the changing social sphere, the decrease of the courtly system and the rise of a middle class, of which Austen and her readers were members. It was in the redefining of civil society that Austen’s novels and her Feminism lay, because according to Kelly, the redefinition relied largely on the roles of women. He says this is most shown in Persuasion, showing the upper class as greatly flawed and unable to see past the ideas of class. The people in the novel that she does not criticize are the navel officers and their wives, the professionals, which would have been of the same class she inhabited. This is also a civil society inhabited by women as well as men, and while they are still domestic they are seen as very important.
He states that Austen in showing women in the roles society assigned to them, she, “both represented and exemplified the power of women to create and sustain civil society, if given appropriate opportunity to do so”(Kelly 32). This may present a problem for current feminists, but Kelly writes that it is a function of feminism to see not only what is going on in the present but to see the past feminism in its own context and how it was shaped by both individuals and the collective of the time period.