Abstract
This thesis proposes to explore Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice and Love & Friendship through the contour of study of eighteenth-century feeling, notably those qualities related to her fictional heroines as well as femininity around Austen’s time. For Austen, reason and feeling must keep to the balance for marital felicity. What is foregrounded in the novel, namely, sense and sensibility, therefore needs to be complementary instead of contradictory. This thesis also explores the contemporary philosophers of eighteenth-century, like David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s, diversified thoughts on feeling and reason. As an empiricist, Hume focuses on human’s reason becoming the slave of feeling and passion. Jane Austen’s three novels have vividly portrayed women’s tenacious effort to keep the balance between feeling and reason in life. Therefore, feeling and reason challenge much human’s epistemology, from which many people need to resolve the ambiguities in between.