I’m through Persuasion, Sense, Pride, and Emma.

So far I think Austen’s take on Learned women is more complex than having an explicitly learned character — especially in Persuasion where I think she plays with the idea of what constitutes learning/education/knowledge/genres.

In Pride, Sense, and Emma, education, especially in the form of reading — being well read, an active reader — is important but usually in context of seeming an attractive choice for a wife. Education is largely just a criteria for a good marriage, not something that allows one to think for oneself — although many of her heroines do just that — but not because they learned how to from books.

the thing is, if all that book training provides a woman is a history of their own inconstancies then I imagine Austen had a sense that reading culture wasn’t the best place for her heroines. So far they each argue somewhat against being considered too much as women readers etc. Reading, as it is argued for by the men, is for the making of sensible wives instead of silly ones. Reading is almost an imposition put on women — by men or established polite society — so that they are well behaved in marriage. It seems like through reading women are taught how to behave, to obey, to be quiet, frugal not silly/frivolous/extravagant/

improprietous. But then too much reading, of course, can have the opposite effect the way it does for Mary Crawford.

So what, in Austen, are positive attributes of women? What makes them clever, good conversationalists, different from the women who are portrayed as really inconstant, or tacky, materialistic, unfaithful? Austen’s heroines think strongly for themselves, but not because they are self possessed through book learning…what is the cultural/intellectual heritage/history of the Austen heroine? Perhaps there will be connections between the attributes found in FB and the attributes of Anne or Emma or Eliza.

What is for sure is that Austen rejects the masculine monopoly of codified knowledge through books — it is clear how book learning has been used against her sex. But where is the alternative hiding in her pages? I think there could be something here that will point towards a feminine gendered education/intellectual history…what we are searching for are characteristics of a women’s cognitive training that exist outside the masculinist paradigm of history of ideas.

what are the differences we can begin to identify between gendered ways of knowing, i.e. autodidacts vs. women trained by men vs. women who create knowledge totally outside of traditional textualities (perhaps like Penelope)? I think Austen may be asking just this.

I haven’t really delved into Mary Hays’s Female Biography yet so I am eager to see what kinds of attributes she exalts and then figure out how those attributes are acquired. If there is a connection between any of these and JA’s heroines then I am on to something. But there is also the connection between JA and MH simply in the nature of their projects — and this is the Christine de Pizan connection. JA’s oeuvre could be considered her City, just like FB etc.

Keywords: jane austen, mary hays, philosophy of history, womens intellectual history