JANE AUSTEN'S WORKS: REALIST TRADITIONS AND THE INTERPRETATION OF FEMALE CHARACTER

This article examines realist traditions in Jane Austen’s fiction and analyzes the artistic interpretation of female character in her major novels. Although Austen wrote at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her novels anticipate many features later associated with literary realism: close observation of everyday life, psychological subtlety, social criticism, and attention to ordinary domestic experience. The article argues that Austen’s female characters are not merely romantic heroines; they are thinking, morally responsive, socially constrained, and emotionally developing individuals. Through the analysis of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Mansfield Park, the study shows how Austen represents women within the frameworks of class, marriage, inheritance, and propriety, while also giving them intellectual depth and ethical agency. The paper concludes that Austen’s realism lies not in dramatic external events, but in her precise portrayal of human motives, social behavior, and the difficult process by which women learn to judge themselves and the world more clearly.