Jane Austen’s Characters
Austen peopled six novels with heroines who think, suitors who scheme, and relations who mortify. This database profiles each character — age, income, residence, fate — cross-referenced with the novels and every screen portrayal.
Anne Elliot
Persuasion
Anne Elliot is the quiet, overlooked second daughter of vain Sir Walter Elliot — 27 years old and, by Regency standards, past her prime. Eight years before the novel opens she was persuaded to break her engagement to Captain Wentworth; Persuasion is the story of what happens when he sails back into her life, successful and still unmarried.
Captain Frederick Wentworth
Persuasion
Captain Frederick Wentworth is a Royal Navy officer who made a fortune in prize money during the Napoleonic Wars — the very success Anne Elliot's family once considered him too poor to deserve. He returns to Anne's circle eight years after she refused his proposal, wealthy, eligible, and still wounded by her rejection.
Catherine Morland
Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland is Austen's most ordinary heroine by design — an unremarkable seventeen-year-old from a large, unglamorous family whose head is full of Gothic novels. Her first trip away from home, to Bath and then to Northanger Abbey, tests her imagination against reality and gently corrects it.
Edmund Bertram
Mansfield Park
Edmund Bertram is the only member of the Mansfield Park household who treats his young cousin Fanny Price with real kindness — and the man she has quietly loved for years while he pursues the glamorous, ultimately unsuitable Mary Crawford.
Elizabeth Bennet
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet is the heroine of Pride and Prejudice — the quick-witted, independent second daughter of the Bennet family. Austen called her "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print," and her journey from confident misjudgment to self-knowledge anchors the novel.
Emma Woodhouse
Emma
Emma Woodhouse — "handsome, clever, and rich" — is the wealthy, motherless mistress of Hartfield and Highbury's self-appointed matchmaker. Confident in her own judgment and blind to her own heart, she is Austen's most flawed heroine and, by the novel's own admission, "had a disposition to think a little too well of herself."
Fanny Price
Mansfield Park
Fanny Price is sent at age ten to live among her wealthy Bertram relations at Mansfield Park, where she grows up treated as a poor relation by everyone but her cousin Edmund. Quiet, principled, and easily overlooked, she is Austen's most morally serious heroine — and her most divisive.
Fitzwilliam Darcy
Pride and Prejudice
Fitzwilliam Darcy is the male protagonist of Pride and Prejudice — master of Pemberley, worth £10,000 a year, and initially dismissed by Elizabeth Bennet as the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world. His journey from arrogance to humility made him fiction's definitive romantic hero.
George Knightley
Emma
George Knightley is Emma's neighbor at Donwell Abbey, older brother-in-law to Emma's sister, and the only person in Highbury willing to tell Emma when she is wrong. Sixteen years her senior, he has watched her grow up — and is the first to admit, once she deserves it, that he has come to love her.
Henry Tilney
Northanger Abbey
Henry Tilney is a witty young clergyman Catherine Morland meets at a Bath assembly — quick, well-read, and given to teasing Catherine about the Gothic novels she loves. He is the one to gently, decisively correct her wildest suspicion about his own family.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are Jane Austen’s main characters?
Each novel centers on a heroine: Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), Elinor and Marianne Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility), Emma Woodhouse (Emma), Fanny Price (Mansfield Park), Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey), and Anne Elliot (Persuasion).
Who is Jane Austen’s most famous character?
Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice are her most famous creations — their names have become shorthand for the entire romance genre.