Name: Saroj Kumar Ray
Country: India

Year: 2025
Volume: Volume-16, Issue-2, (July-December)
Page Number: 38-41
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20323788

ABSTRACT
This study examines how Jane Austen and Anita Desai transform intimate domestic life into a field of social, gendered, and economic power. Although Austen writes within the world of Regency England and Desai writes from postcolonial Indian middle-class contexts, both authors reveal that family is never merely private. It is shaped by property, inheritance, marriage, class discipline, emotional labour, and patriarchal expectation. Austen’s fiction presents marriage as a moral and economic institution through which women negotiate security, affection, rank, and self-respect. Desai’s novels, particularly Clear Light of Day, Cry, the Peacock, and Fire on the Mountain, expose the psychological costs of domestic confinement, gendered care, and emotional invisibility. The study argues that both writers politicize intimacy by showing how family life becomes a structure of power where women’s agency is limited but never erased. Austen’s irony and Desai’s psychological realism differ i