The state of marriage in the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by wealth and social standing. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen challenge these ideas through their protagonists Jane and Lizzy. Each woman creates her own identity and sense of independence, which enables her to formulate relationships with men atypical for the time. With love, not wealth and security, as their chief objectives, Jane and Lizzy follow their hearts and marry men with whom they can build happy and useful life-long relationships.
             Jane shows independence by creating her own identity. As a poor orphan with few role models, from birth she is forced to develop her independence. Jane lives with her disgruntled Aunt, to whom she is related merely through marriage, Aunt Reed detests the burden of raising Jane, forced on her by her late husband. Jane observes " It must have been irksome to find herself bound by a hard wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an un-congenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group." When Jane is involved in an argument with her cousin and Aunt Reed due to her out spoken nature, Jane is thrown in the terrifying red room. In spite of this Jane remains courageous:
             I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthen the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment's mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
             After this instance Jane's relationship with Aunt Reed is much different: soon after she is sent to boarding school and is never called back home. At Lowood Jane again must exert independence. She befr...