Both The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter and Persuasion by Jane Austen are constructed as love stories, although not conventional love stories. Austen's novel is part of the cultural movement of Romanticism as, although in earlier novels she satires Romanticism, Persuasion does bear some of the hallmarks of the Romantic period. Carter's novel however, can be seen as an ironic look at the Romantic novel. Therefore both novels provide an interesting viewpoint on their male characters, due not only to their style of writing but also to the novelists' gender and their obvious ideologies.

Jane Austen was an early standpoint feminist1 and so it is perhaps surprising to find her writing in the Romantic genre as it was "historically a male phenomenon"2 which not only objectified women but also "subjected them... in order to appropiate the feminine for male subjectivity"3. Female Romantic writers such as Austen "critique the...