I believe that Jane Austen would have been influenced by Mary
Wollstonecraft (1759-1787).
This would probably most especially been
the case with Wollstonecraft's authorship of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with
Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), a "radical feminist manifesto" that
was printed even before Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
(1791-1792).
Jane Austen, like Wollstonecraft, was a free-thinking
feminist who questioned the place of women within society by flouting the conventions that
limited the things women were "allowed" to do. However, Austen handled her "rebellion" in a much
more conventional way. Where Wollstonecraft struck out on her own, took work to support herself
and wrote under her own name, Jane Austen was secretive about her writing and when she published
her pieces, her name did not appear on the cover.
There is no
question, however, that Austen's female protagonists flouted convention and were heroic rather
than vulgar or scandalous as one might expect some readers of her day to react. Born in 1775,
Jane would have been approximately seventeen when Wollstonecraft's "call to arms" (A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral
Subjects) was printed to address the inequities of society towards women. Jane wrote
her first novel at the age of fourteen, so she would also have been well read even before
Wollstonecraft's book was published.
And as a reader and educated
woman, I believe it would be logical to assume that Jane would have found a kindred spirit in the
person of Wollstonecraft, though whereas Mary would have flaunted the reading of such a book,
Austen probably would have read the book secretly, just as she completed the writing of her
novels.
Having both lived in England at approximately the same time,
and both having been associated with a wide variety of free thinkers and/or writers, I would
expect that both women, while not necessarily knowing each other, might have traveled in some of
the same "sub-circles" of society, finding themselves in the "orbits" of some of the same
literary figures of the day.
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