< Jane Austen < Characters

Jane Austen/Characters/Heroines

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Elinor Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility

"If you can think me capable of ever feeling -- surely you may suppose that I have suffered now."

Marianne Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility

"I have been too much at my ease, too happy, too frank. I have erred against every common-place notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitful -- had I talked only of the weather and the roads, and had I spoken only once in ten minutes, this reproach would have been spared."

  • Annoying Younger Sibling: Mildly
  • Birds of a Feather: With Colonel Brandon, as revealed via Ironic/Meaningful Echo.
  • Emo Teen
  • Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Responsible Elinor and foolish Marianne, albeit one where the "foolish" daughter is portrayed fairly sympathetically.
  • Ill Girl: Towards the end of the novel.
  • It's All About Me: Marianne is deeply self-absorbed, considering her feelings (whether positive or negative) absolutely irrepressible and in the process disregarding common politeness and the feelings of others; when circumstances force Elinor to confess that she too has been unhappy, Marianne breaks down in tears of remorse, forcing Elinor to comfort her again, and continues to wallow in her own unhappiness - with added guilt, now - rather than provide emotional support for Elinor. It takes near-death to smarten her up. Granted, she's a teenager, but it's a major contrast with Elinor, who's 19 and displays more responsibility and consideration for others than many people much older than her.
  • Love Triangle
  • May-December Romance
  • The McCoy
  • Oblivious to Love: Marianne seems, through much of the story, like she's deliberately ignoring Colonel Brandon's undeclared love for her. On literally the second-to-last page, it's finally clarified that she honestly had no idea, and is stunned when she realizes it.
  • Sibling Yin-Yang: With Elinor
  • Wrong Guy First
  • You Go, Girl!: Her anti-Stepford Smiler ways
  • You Got Spunk: According to Colonel Brandon

Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

"I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going tomorrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all."

Fanny Price, Mansfield Park

"I should have thought that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself."

Emma Woodhouse

"I seem to have been doomed to blindness."

Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey

"I can not speak well enough to be unintelligible."

Anne Elliot, Persuasion

"All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."

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