Due to the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 18th century, the society of English had undergone a series of racial changes and the most noticeable one was in the economy. With a rapid development of capitalism, England had entered in a prosperous stage as an advanced industrial country; meanwhile the increasing gap between the rich and poor raised the acutest social conflicts. “It was the best of time; it was the worst of time,” says Dickens, the greatest representative of this period, at the very beginning of his book A Tale of Two Cities. In this period of tense class struggle, it appeared a new literary trend – critical realism, which was flourished in the 19th century forties and early fifties. The trend mainly focused on revealing the corrupting influence of the ruling of money upon human nature. It not only gave a description usually twined with humor and satire to the bourgeoisie and the ruling class, but also showed the writer’s sympathy to ordinary people. 

Distinguished from other literature trends before, women novelists had played an important role since the second half of the 18th century and some gifted women of the 19th century made great contributions to the development of the English novel. Those remarkable women include but are not limited to Jane Austen, Brontë Sisters, Mrs. Gaskell and Gorge Eliot. It was the huge demand of industry that made it possible. The country developed with high growth, so that family had extra money to support more children for education and thus education was no longer a privilege of the male; in the meanwhile a great deal of employment created by industrialization offered the female possibilities of economic independence. As a result, more and more educated and independent women appeared. Seeing serious social conditions, educated women began to make a voice on the female stance. With the most distinguished gender trait against men, they consequently meditated on female issues, especially how to get rid of man-dominant marriages. For a long time, religious sermons and other paper works restricted women’s place in family. The traditional view was that women were not allowed to have their own careers and the attachment to men was the only way for them to survive in society; because of this, they would never have the chance of independence. However, the old-fashioned theory was going to shake and crumble. A door to a brand new world had been opened for them.

1.2 Jane Austen and Emily Brontë

Jane Austen and Emily Brontë yelled out against unfair treatment and challenged the traditional view on women. On the female stance, they created many female roles that fought for women’s equality and freedom through different means and all the more so did the heroines of their masterpieces, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. By comparing the images of heroines Elizabeth Bennett and Catherine Earnshaw in Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, the thesis dissects the similarity and difference between their writers’ marriage values and strives to find out female consciousness mirrored in these two novels.

1.2.1 Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, in an eight-sibling and middle class family and in Hampshire, a small town in the southwest England. Her father was a rector of the church and her mother came from a rich family with certain culture. Austen brought up in an intellectual environment but a restricted living area. Though she did not enter a regular school, her family's fine conditions and environment offered her the conditions for self-learning, and cultivated her interest in writing. She began to write at an early age, thirteen or fourteen and showed her talent in language expression. In 1800 his father retired and the family moved to Bath. After her father died there, Austen and her family moved to Southampton in 1809 and then moved again to Jordan. At the beginning of 1816, she was infected with tuberculosis and died on 18 July. She never married and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. 《傲慢与偏见》与《呼啸山庄》女主人公的比较研究(2):http://www.chuibin.com/yingyu/lunwen_206055.html