Stop Comparing Austen to Victorian Women

art from here

Jane Austen died in the year 1817. That year:

• Elizabeth Gaskell was 7 years old
• Charlotte Brontë was 1 year old
• George Eliot, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë had not been born yet

But time and time again, I see Austen talked about in the same sentence as women like the Brontës as if they had all been writing at the same time and it's really unfair to me. Despite what you might think with it coming first, the Regency era was waaaaaay more liberal than the Victorian era. Austen never had to use a male pen name. While she and the Victorian women all wrote dynamic, innovative female characters, they were innovative in extremely different ways. The books were political in different ways. While Pride and Prejudice and North and South both feature an enemies-to-lovers couple that works through political and class differences to live happily ever after, the things that complicate their relationships are different because the types of people who were being written about, and the things they were dealing with, were different.

I'm not trying to say that you can't compare all these books from a critical lens just because they were written in different eras. But I see so many people talking as if Austen and the Brontës were contemporaries and they weren't!!!

Also, I just realized something weird. I don't think I could name a single female contemporary of Austen's. Hang on, I'm gonna Google "regency literature."

Okay, the first two women I see here  on the Wikipedia article are Susan Ferrier and Maria Edgeworth. Gonna be honest, I don't know a single god damn thing about their work. That's weird, right? Apparently I have at least looked at the Wikipedia article for Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent because the link is purple. I'm actually really curious why the general populace know so many more female authors from the Victorian era than the Regency. Maybe literature was more accessible in general because of stuff like the printing press and newspaper serials? Curious if Ferrier and Edgeworth are more widely known in the UK because I guarantee if I asked most people here who Austen's female contemporaries were those names would not come up. Odd.