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This project examines the trajectory of female agency in novels by Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy, where we can track a decline in the kind of agency women experienced in nineteenth-century Britain. Despite the attention that is often given to the leading men in Austen’s works in the popular culture, it is in her depiction of the minor male characters and their relationships with the female characters that we see how the dynamics between male/female relationships provide the female characters with exploring female agency. In order to get a better sense of the comparison of the freedom female characters experienced in these novels, this thesis examines secondary male characters in Austen, the Brontës, and Hardy, and the dynamics between male/female relationships. The dynamics include equality between female and male characters of the same social class, freedom of sexual response to male characters, and the limitations of male characters on female characters. Beginning with Austen’s minor male characters and their relationships and interacGons with the female characters, the reader notes a relation between the freedom and equality enjoyed by female and male characters of the same class specially in their selection of marriage partners. This freedom to exercise female agency continues in the mid-century depictions of the heroines and their interactions with the male characters in Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester in Jane Eyre. The non-normative Heathcliff and Rochester highlight physical intimacy and an openness to diverse forms of human sexuality not seen in Austen. Hardy’s heroine in Tess of the d’Urberville: A Pure Woman is stripped of all female agency and is consistently denied the freedom to make crucial choices. My goal is to bring attention to Victorian-era studies, primarily focusing on how the dynamics between the male/female relationships in these novels show differences in the freedom to make choices as seen in the female characters. Awareness of the decline of the freedom the female characters enjoyed in Austen and the Brontë novels discussed provides insight into the unfortunate regression of female agency in the current era.