Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice, holds feminist views and uses the novel to show her opinions about womens issues. Pride and Prejudice is a personal essay, a statement of Jane Austens feelings about the perfect lady, marriage, and the relationship between the sexes. Jane Austens characters, plot, and dialogue are biased to reflect her beliefs. The biased process and importance of marriage are introduced with the first line of the book. Jane Austen writes: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering the neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. (5) This implies that the man wants a wife and the woman is not in a place to turn him down. The man becomes her claim, and for him she fights with other women. It seems as if women are plentiful and men are rare. The man has freedom and the option to choose any girl that he wants, while the women are desperate and fight for whichever man they can get. Jane Austen points this out and shows how dependent the woman is on a man in her English society. This dependence is viewed as a necessary part of upper class England by most and was not criticized. If Jane Austen had written a book simply about English society, these sentiments would not have showed up. The fact that they are introduced and expressed again and again in Pride and Prejudice means that Jane Austen held feminist ideals and expressed them in this piece of writing. A woman must be a certain type of person and act a certain way in order to be respected, accepted, and deemed accomplished. The woman that achieves all of this is the perfect lady.The perfect lady is representative of the times, and Jane Austen exploits this so called perfection...
