Jane Austen's works are characterized by their classic depictions of love among the English nobility. Most of Austen's novels use the lens of romance to provide social commentary through both realism and irony. Austen's first published bookThe central conflicts in both Jane Austen's novels Emma and Persuasion rest on the structure of class systems and the resulting social differences between the nobility and the proletariat. Although Emma and Persuasion were written only a year apart, Austen's treatment of social class systems differs markedly between the two novels, thus allowing us to trace the development of her beliefs regarding the nobility and their role in society through analysis of Austen's different treatment of class systems in Emma and Persuasion. The society depicted in Emma is based on a much more rigid social structure than that of the naval society of Persuasion, which Austen embodies through her strikingly different female protagonists, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Eliot, and their respective conflicts. In her final novel, Persuasion, Austen explores the emerging idea of ​​meritocracy through her portrayal of the male protagonist, Captain Wentworth. The evolution from a traditional society based on aristocracy in Emma to a contemporary one based on meritocracy in Persuasion embodies Austen's own development and illustrates her subversion of almost all the social attitudes and institutions that were central to her early novels. Because of Austen's treatment of the class system in Persuasion, the novel can be divided into two somewhat contradictory halves. Austen spends much of the first half of the novel attempting to convince the audience of the importance of a system of good manners, over... middle of paper... Emma's voice to relate internal ideology, while simultaneously using a somewhat ironic third-person narrative voice to provide critical social commentary on the social attitudes of the Highbury society depicted in Emma. Emma's voice allows the reader to gain a genuine insight into the lives of the people of Highbury, providing the narrative a Austen uses a somewhat similar dichotomous technique in Persuasion, in which she divides the novel into two halves - one in which she supports the traditional system of formality, and another that works to eradicate the same system that he so extolled in the first half. Under the deceptive guise of “political inaction,” Austen actually provides commentary on the underlying social and political issues that pervade the novel through the literary technique of heteroglossia (Parker 359).