Abstract: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817) are fictional works that share a common and uniting thread. Here, we see an emerging picture of marriage starkly opposed to the realist and bleak picture of romantic love (in the form of marriage) forwarded by early modern women writers such as Mary Astell, Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans Montpensier and Françoise de Motteville, and Margaret Cavendish. These figures liken marriage to slavery and prescribe avoidance—in particular, if one can withdraw to focus on moral and religious education. In contrast, we see marriage in the works of Jane Austen as a liberating and purpose-creating force that a host of young fictional women eagerly pursue. This paper examines the stark differences between Austen's fictional heroine's experiences of marriage and the commonly discussed picture of marriage in early modern women's works. The overarching goal is to see how diverging characterizations of marriage existed in the early modern period and examine the functionality of these different views. Ultimately, it seems that Austen's characters experience the kind of marriage that early modern women writers only admit of on rare occasions—the kind of marriage adequately based on a love founded in friendship. I begin the paper by situating this topic historically—what were the conditions of marriage that provided the backdrop for this discourse? Next, I offer a skeletal outline of the views of marriage presented by Astell, Cavendish, Motteville, and Montpensier. Here, the paper makes careful distinctions, given that these four figures have specific comments to make about the institution of marriage despite their broad agreement on the topic. Following this, I survey instances of marriage from Austen's work. Finally, the paper examines how the form of marriage presented in Austen's works contrasts the prevailing views held by women philosophers at the time before making some thematic comments about how we should interpret the functionality of the works surveyed in this paper. I will argue here that even though Austen does not prescribe to the bleak picture of marriage, her work still provides important practical advice for young women who can gain social and political power from marriage.