Jane Austen; The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Persuasion by Jane Austen; The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft Answer only one of the essay prompts: 1. To what extent, and in what ways, does it change your understanding of Jane Austen’s fiction to read it alongside the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft? Does it make sense to think of Austen as a feminist or proto-feminist writer, or would you resist that description? 2. How far would you defend Austen’s fiction, and on what grounds, against one of the following objections? You may, if you wish, conduct your argument in a way that involves comparison and/or contrast with Wollstonecraft. a. “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores” (Charlotte Brontë). b. “[V]ulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). c. “It makes me most uncomfortable to see | An English spinster of the middle-class | Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’, | Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety | The economic basis of society” (W. H. Auden).