This research thematizes the representation of female characters in novels of Jane Austen,
aiming to analyze the female protagonists of the novels Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride
and Prejudice (1813). As methodology, it is used a bibliographic and qualitative analysis,
based on authors as Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, Simone de Beauvoir in The
Second Sex, Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Michelle Perrot in
My History of Women, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, Elaine Showalter in A literature
of their own, among others. The aim, analyzing these protagonists, was to understand how
they break or follow the patriarchy rules of their time. The analysis reveals how they move
forward or backward the rules of the patriarchal society, now searching marriage as the
happiness ideal, now searching autonomy, for instance. It is understood that the characters
move between the literary feminist phases, because sometimes they seem to act as the
women from the feminine phase, in a passive way, without questioning, but sometimes they
are in the feminist phase ahead of their time, defying the patriarchal rules, in a clear
representation of the small feminist advances of their time.
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