Jane Austen's Heroines: All Six, Compared
By Jane Austen Page Editors · Updated July 5, 2026
Jane Austen's six novels each center on a different kind of heroine: witty Elizabeth Bennet, sensible Elinor Dashwood, meddling Emma Woodhouse, principled Fanny Price, imaginative Catherine Morland, and constant Anne Elliot. None of them is a passive romantic heroine in the older novelistic mold.
Austen never wrote the same heroine twice. Each of the six carries a different flaw, and each novel is built to cure it.
| Heroine | Novel | Starting flaw | What corrects her |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elinor Dashwood | Sense and Sensibility | Excessive self-control | Learning that reticence has costs too |
| Elizabeth Bennet | Pride and Prejudice | Pride in her own judgment | Darcy’s letter |
| Fanny Price | Mansfield Park | (Least flawed — a moral touchstone) | Others’ behavior contrasted against her steadiness |
| Emma Woodhouse | Emma | Meddling overconfidence | The Box Hill humiliation and its aftermath |
| Catherine Morland | Northanger Abbey | Gothic-novel imagination | Henry Tilney’s gentle correction |
| Anne Elliot | Persuasion | Excessive persuadability (in the past) | A second chance she is now ready for |
Not passive romance leads
Where earlier 18th-century fiction often rewarded heroines for endurance and virtue alone, Austen’s women are judged on the quality of their thinking. Elizabeth Bennet’s “til this moment, I never knew myself” and Emma’s “she had erred” mark the genre’s shift toward interior, psychological heroines — a template the novel has followed ever since.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Jane Austen’s most popular heroine?
Elizabeth Bennet, by a wide margin — Austen herself called her "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print," and modern polls consistently rank her fiction's favorite heroine.
What do Jane Austen's heroines have in common?
Each begins the novel with a specific misjudgment — of a person, of society, or of her own feelings — that the plot exists to correct. Austen's heroines are rarely punished for external circumstance; they are corrected by self-knowledge.