Role of Education in Transcending Birth and Social Class: A Comparison of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl

Abstract

Jane Austen's novels also known as the novels of manners belonged to the genre of moral-domestic novels that empowered women in the domestic life in the nineteenth century England focusing on the family dynamics in grooming the young adolescent women. Louisa May Alcott was the shining star of domestic fiction written for girls in nineteenth-century America. Domestic fiction also known as sentimental novels were written by women for young adolescent girls which revealed the dominant American culture and society in which they lived. The aim of this paper is to explore the journey of the female protagonists who in their adolescence are not led by temptations of class and wealth but practice the virtue of self-denial in creating an identity on attaining adulthood. In addition, this paper is multidisciplinary n approach in comparing the family and social environment of nineteenth century England and America as described in the novels that is significant to the self-education of the female protagonists