Isabelle de Charrière, Jane Austen, and Post-Enlightenment Fiction: Writing the Shared Humanity of Men and Women

This article analyses Isabelle de Charrière and Jane Austen together in relation to the changing perception of humanity affecting European thinking at end eighteenth century. Not only is Charrière’s rather lesser-known work likely benefit from comparison, but Austen’s novels also gain philosophical depth when read alongside hers. Each one an outsider her own world, wrote against grain inherited gender prejudices growing conservatism binary orthodoxy around 1800. Adopting as writers a perspective freed ‘feminine’ expectations, opposed lady novelist embodied by famous Montolieu, they endeavoured invent characters stories distinct pervasive definitions feminine masculine, giving readers possibility considering shared equally shaping men women.