Austen and Bronte: the ideal marriage

"She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well... she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress."  Charlotte Bronte on Jane Austen
Both Bronte and Austen have been much revered as romance novelist, their novels have been taken as literary versions of fairy tales that have fueled the imaginations and fantasies of generations of adolescent girls. However, at closer inspection they are much more then that, reflecting the viewpoints that dominated 19th century English society. Both Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre are "bildungsroman" that feature an  ideal Englishwoman with a strong moral center who overcome lives problems and sorrows while maintaining her integrity and honor and in reward gains a suitable husband. In these novels a woman's choice of  a suitable mate became not only the basis of her identity as a respectable Englishwoman but also depended the future of the family unit and thereby the longevity of the state. Thus these novels showcase the changing face of English society and the women in it, both of which were heavily influenced by internal and external factors affecting england at the time.
As Austen and Bronte published their novel at different periods of the 18th century we can gauge how the perceptions of women evolved. An example of this can be seen by comparing how the marriage of their protagonist took place. While Austen's heroine gained a husband through her integrity and patience as she waited around until he  noticed her, even the moment of the proposal was equally lackluster, taking place "exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so". Fanny herself was molded and taught by Edmund, her attitudes towards religion, morality and everything else was carved after his image thus making their marriage a suitable one. While Jane throughout the novel had to fight her passion or her femaleness for reason or her femininity as an English woman. Her morals and religious conviction was not spoon fed to her and neither was her path to  marriage easy. Furthermore, she started her marriage by proclaiming "i married him", thus demonstrating some agency in her life. Their match was a suitable one due to their difference, as Jane as an displaced, single female woman needed a man to find a home an place in the domestic English sphere, while Rochester needed the love of a strong female to regain his values and establish himself as an ideal English subject.