In season two of Netflix’s wildly popular television series Bridgerton, protagonist and resident feminist Eloise Bridgerton tells her friend Penelope Featherington: “We should both aspire to be . . . unmarried, earning our own money.” This aspiration, so familiar in the twenty-first century, so at odds with the Georgian period in which Bridgerton is set, also seems at odds with that most beloved of Georgian authors from whom the show draws inspiration—Jane Austen. Austen would have much to teach Eloise, whose shallow twenty-first-century feminism stands in direct contrast to the anthropologically rich feminism presented in Austen’s work, which regards women as rational creatures capable of heroic virtue.
