Jane Austen "rant"

So, normally I would completely agree with the opinion that "Jane Austen is the perfect antidote to life," but since this post is supposed to be a rant, I will go ahead and air that major problem I have with all of Austen's novels: her heroines always get married. Yes, no matter what goes wrong in their lives, our heroines forget all about it as soon as they get their happily-ever-after marriages. For a woman who never married herself, you'd think Austen would have wanted a heroine like herself, someone who didn't need the love or money of a man to feel successful and satisfied. Perhaps Austen never did feel truly satisfied without a man, but since she did accept a man and then turn him down the next day, I have trouble believing that. I feel that Austen's endings take previously promising strong female characters and turn them into the "typical female" of the time. If they had had any personal or intellectual achievements throughout the novel, or seemed an original character, this attribute is taken away from all of them at the end of the novel when they give themselves away as a wife (let's face it, wives back then were expected to completely submit to their husbands and operate purely as heir-producing, beautiful fixtures in the home). In this way, I really don't think Austen had any original ideas about women for her time. While she was sometimes subtly political, ironic, and satirical of society, she does not offer women another alternative besides spinsterhood, marriage, or dying alone of an STD in an alley. The fact that Jane Austen didn't feel comfortable writing an unmarried heroine (like herself) shows what a harsh social eye she must have been under. Though she might not have sold as many novels during her lifetime if she had written a heroine who never married and did not want to marry, I think she would have been respected much more as a writer (eventually).