A Senior Capstone Experience by Lucy Verlaque ’25

Submitted to the Department of English

Advised by Dr. Katie Charles

Contributor Biography: Lucy Verlaque graduated summa cum laude from Washington College in May 2025. She was the recipient of the Maureen Jacoby Prize and a finalist for the Sophie Kerr Prize. As a WC student, Lucy spent most of her time involved with the literary community and student publications, serving in various editorial positions for Washington College Review, The Elm, and Collegian. She also worked in the writing center as a peer writing consultant and Miller Library as an interlibrary loan assistant. In her free time, Lucy loves drinking coffee, traveling, and obsessing over Jane Austen. 

Description: This thesis aims to reorient modern readers’ perceptions of the function of romance in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). Though the love story between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy has captured the attention of readers and scholars alike, this paper argues that positioning their romance plot as the novel’s goal prioritizes the male love interest’s presence in the female protagonist’s story. Rather, the text establishes a far more pressing focus on its female characters’ journeys seeking self-determination within a patriarchal system that routinely attempts to deny them this freedom. Using Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) as a touchstone for late eighteenth-century feminist theory, this paper analyzes Austen’s life and time through a female-focused lens, close reads passages of Pride and Prejudice that use romance as a tool to enable and support female agency, and analyzes how choices made in the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries that diverge from the novel might impact audiences’ receptions of these messages. 

Read Lucy’s SCE below: