“We Always Say What We Like to One Another”: The Influence of Education on Women, Sympathy and Marriage in Early Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Abstract

This thesis project investigates the relationship between education, sympathy, and marriage by analyzing the courtship process in three early nineteenth-century novels alongside three female educational texts. The role education plays in Austen’s Emma, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Gaskell’s North and South, particularly in terms of female characters’ marriage prospects, shows how writers at this time conceived of intellectual equality and opportunities for women, and how the terms in which they did so actively engaged with conduct book discourse. This project expands on Nancy Armstrong’s foundational study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, Desire and Domestic Fiction, to show the continued interplay between novels and conduct literature through the mid-nineteenth century, a relationship she sees as defunct after the eighteenth century, as well as the vital role that the sympathetic exchange plays in completing a woman’s education. The thesis demonstrates how this fiction transformed possibilities for female characters’ social interactions, equality, and intellectual fulfilment by reimagining the terms of their domestic and romantic relationships in a dynamic engagement with the language and precepts of key conduct texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.