"Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought," said Mrs. Bennet; "and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle directly."

The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she would, and the argument ended only with the visit.
                       —Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 5

In the above example, taken from her most popular and well-known work, the male speaker is not even given a name. He remains throughout only a generic caricature of a teenage boy, whose identity is solely derived from his female relatives, the older sisters who are the main characters' friends and neighbors. He is overridden and made a fool of by the most foolish and superficial character in the book, and has no other function than comic relief. He is a cardboard cutout, and no more.

A counter-argument could be made, to the effect that it is quite permissible to have underdeveloped characters, "extras" if you will, whose sole purpose is to provide a touch of comic relief, and that to insist on seeing such figures as indicative of a wider bias is to make much of nothing significant. So let us consider the characters which are meant to be more significant, for good or bad, in the story scheme.

The honest reader will be forced to concede that no male character in Jane Austen's works exists on his own, has an identity apart from the women who furnish the sole viewpoints in her novels, or has any function other than his importance to them as potential marriage material, or alternately, as an obstacle to be deal with. Consider Darcy, the ostensible hero of Pride and Prejudice — and who is hardly on stage at all. His character is supposed to on the one hand be revealed as better than first appearances would indicate, and on the other to develop beyond his original limitations — yet how much of this is actually shown?

He goes from being judgmental and distant to being helpful and apologetic without any access to his internal feelings or musings: his development is limited to external actions, and most of those related at third hand and after the fact. What is important to Austen is the opinions and emotions of the sisters, Elizabeth and Jane, who debate and evaluate Darcy's personality at length, but only in the interstices of their own lives, as secondary to more important matters like family finances and their social standing in the changing class hierarchy of the Industrial Revolution — even though Elizabeth is supposed to be angstily torn between dislike and love for Darcy!

And Bingley, the other main love interest, is — if possible — even less interesting. Both men are defined in terms of their property and rank, rather than by any definite qualities of their own. Compared to his sisters, who for all their unattractiveness are nonetheless active and sharply-delineated in their Byzantine scheming and cutting remarks, Bingley is but a passive pawn to be fought over by the stronger females in the story. Wickham, the ostensible villain of the piece, who seduces the youngest Bennet sister and elopes with her, is a pallid shadow — it is not even made clear who was the instigator in the situation.

We are told that he is a good-looking officer, but we see so little of him that one finds it impossible to understand what Lydia — who though shallow and stupid as well as arrogant, is nevertheless made vivid and real in her annoying presence — could possibly see in him. One is forced to presume that like many people, teenager Lydia is relating more to a figment of her own imagination, projected onto the uniform without regard for the real human being inside. —Alas, this is also true of her creator.

Austen's second book, Sense and Sensibility, is somewhat better, in that the male characters receive more (though not equal) attention, and actually are given some active roles and allowed to participate in the events surrounding their eventual marriages. But still they remain essentially passive, and they exist only for the sake of the story's heroines, and they are impossible to identify with as real people, not as embodiments of ideals or plot functions.

The stepbrother, whose callousness has occasioned the straightened financial circumstances which create the foundation of the two sisters' relationship issues, is only moved to neglect them by his wife's instigations: his conscience is no more a match for her self-interest than his intellect is a match for her sophistry. The evil Willoughby is less evil than superficial and impulsive — he has no character of his own and is swayed in every direction by external influences, by the pressures of society and family: all his apparent self-confidence and reckless drive, modeled on the Romantic poets who challenged contemporary society in Austen's day, evaporates when confronted with the threat of financial disaster, and he becomes the model of a conventional householder.

In short, he is the stereotypical "sensitive guy," who uses poetry and sarcastic wit to impress his circle of friends, and to set himself apart as "different" in the eyes of women — but it's all an act, and we are never given any insights into what Willoughby himself felt about his disastrous relationships and moral cowardice. He has no other role than to serve as a foil for the real hero of the story, Colonel Brandon. (I will say nothing here about Edward, because, frankly, what is there to say, beyond the fact that both Lucy and Elinor want him?)

Yet even the virtuous Colonel Brandon is no more than an unreal, idealized figure who only exists to give Marianne an opportunity for character development. He actually is sensitive, intelligent, and moreover he's humble, has low self-esteem, and is endlessly loyal and generous with no expectation of reward — the "very perfect gentle knight" of old-fashioned romantic tales! He suffers patiently, passively, and unobtrusively, without inflicting his angst on either the other characters or the reader, and he's always "there" for the women of the story. Flawed, struggling Marianne, striving to make sense of personal betrayal and a world where little is as it seems on the surface, is both more interesting, and infinitely more plausible.

Then there is the friend's husband in Sense and Sensibility who does nothing but hide behind his newspaper on the sofa — a sort of early-nineteenth-century couch potato. And in Persuasion the main character is given a bit of trouble by the attentions of an oaf who could have come out of a sitcom, the "normal guy" who's so dumb that he thinks driving recklessly and fast is the way to impress any young woman, and never notices how much she despises him.

This is hardly an advance on the flamboyant caricatures of "rakes" and "drunkards" and "cads" who serve as the stock cast of obstacles and hardships which the heroines of Austen's juvenilia must overcome — the style has matured over time from her teenage scribblings, but the perceptions have not. Neither heroes nor villains have half the depth or vividness of even the most briefly-depicted and trivial of the women; it is fair to say that even to call them "heroes" and "villains" dignifies these two-dimensional figures with more weight than they deserve. All in all, one must admit that the female characters' clothing is described with more interest and attention in her prose than any of the male characters' personalities — and possesses, indeed, more personality!

Why, one may well ask, is a writer renowned for her realism and psychological insights then guilty of such callous stereotyping and flat characterization of half the human race? First of all, we know that she was single, and following the abrupt ending of her one serious relationship, never ventured to risk rejection afterwards. It is tempting to see her shallow, inauthentic males as writerly revenge on the young man who was persuaded by his family that marriage to a middle-class minister's daughter would ruin his prospects for a bright career in the world.

Moreover, being unmarried, and living her entire life as the daughter of a country vicar, she would probably have had idealistic views about marriage and male-female interactions drawn from her culture. Much, then, of her failings with regard to male characters, whether heroes or villains, must be ascribed to her sheltered life and the fact that she was describing what was outside her own personal experience, just as the emphasis on sisterhood as a more profound and lasting relationship than any romantic attachment is a reflection of her own experiences.

But finally we must turn to another aspect of her novels that, while not technically part of her stories, is yet a significant element of her writing career. Even while scorning the publicity and fame that attended popular writers like Mrs. Radcliffe, Austen was nonetheless strongly concerned that she not be mistaken for a male. Hence she was not content to simply allow the customary "Anonymous" to grace the title pages, but insisted that they bear the byline "by a Lady." She could not bear the thought that anyone would think her work the product of a man's mind. This indicates a much deeper level of gender-identification and corresponding rejection of the other sex than poor characterization and careless writing would necessitate.

The inescapable conclusion that we must reach, then, is that in spite of the admitted descriptive skills and sharply-drawn critiques of a very limited vector of her society to be found in her novels, Austen's worldview was so narrow and her sexism so profound that any claims to depth of insight into the human condition must be — sadly — put aside. As light entertainment requiring little to no engagement of the critical facilities, or as a corpus of historical documents filled with details valuable to the student of life in small-town Regency England, the works of Jane Austen are incomparable, but the author's bias makes them so fundamentally flawed that for any more significant appreciation of human nature, or realism, the reader must look elsewhere.