I wrote a letter to Cassandra Austen as Jane Austen upon learning that she was still popular nearly 200 years after her first novel was published as part of a model research project for my students. I decided to share the Jane Austen heroine trading cards I also made for the project.

I made these cards using background papers from *freaky655 on deviantART and Bling Cheese and images from some of the film versions (see Works Cited below). I used Gimp to put them together. A note about some of my choices: I decided quick facts should include both a love interest and a nemesis. I tried as much as possible to choose for the love interest the main person the heroine was interested in, which is why Col. Brandon isn’t mentioned. It took Marianne most of the book to appreciate him. On the other hand, I listed both Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightley for Emma because I felt she fairly evenly divided her time interested in them. The nemeses were also my own impression of the person who most crossed or most annoyed the heroine. I suppose both love interests and nemeses are open to interpretation in some regards. I was fairly subjective in describing the characters’ personality traits, too. You may/may not feel the same way.

Jane Austen Heroine Trading Cards by Dana Huff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Works Cited:

Emma. Dir. Douglas McGrath. Perf. Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Northam. Miramax, 1996. Film.

Mansfield Park. Dir. Patricia Rozema. Perf. Frances O’Connor, Jonny Lee Miller. Arts Council of England, 1999. Film.

Northanger Abbey. Dir. Jon Jones. Perf. Felicity Jones, J. J. Field, Carey Mulligan. Granada Television, 2007. Film.

Persuasion. Dir. Adrian Shergold. Perf. Sally Hawkins, Alice Krige, Rupert Penry-Jones, Anthony Head. Clerkenwell Films, 2007. Film.

Pride and Prejudice. Dir. Joe Wright. Perf. Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen. Focus Features, 2005. Film.

Sense and Sensibility. Dir. Ang Lee. Perf. Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant. Columbia Pictures, 1995. Film.