Thank goodness Jane Austen never had sex
Lucy Worsley’s inquisition into the novelist’s sex life considered almost every aspect except her morals
How we view our literary heroes often says more about us than it does about them and, 200 years after her death, poor Jane Austen is having to put up with more than her fair share of retrospective impertinence from critics bringing 21st-century notions to bear. First the Bank of England tweaked her image to make her pretty enough to appear on a tenner. Then, speaking at the Hay Literary Festival on Saturday, the historian Lucy Worsley asked and answered a question that wouldn’t even have occurred to previous generations: “Did the spinster Jane Austen ever have sex with a man? Almost certainly not, in my belief.”
As Dorothy Parker remarked, you could have knocked me down with a girder at this point – and that’s before the pixie-faced writer and TV presenter had given her explanation. The reason Miss Austen died a virgin, according to Lucy W, was that she suffered from the man-drought following the Napoleonic Wars.
Her other explanations are that Jane was wary of sex on account of her sisters-in-law dying in childbirth and that she was, moreover, a member of the “pseudo-gentry”, for whom extramarital sex was out of bounds. (As Dr W chirpily observes, the upper classes took a relaxed view of sexual relations – and so they did, for extramarital affairs. It was quite another matter for young women before marriage.)
The possibility that this daughter of a country rector and sister of a clergyman, herself a devout Anglican, might have eschewed premarital sex because she (and her potential suitors) shared the conventional Church of England view of these things seems not to have occurred to this Austen expert. Which is odd, because right now we have a woman prime minister who is a vicar’s daughter and a very committed Anglican; let’s work on that model, shall we?
As I say, the Jane Austen Never Had Sex Shock says more about us than her. But it usefully reminds us that, first, it’s not necessary to have experience of sex to write about sexual attraction (Austen wasn’t an amoral fortune hunter either, but she created entirely credible ones) – and, secondly, the limitations of her experience left her extensive scope to write about the human comedy.
Professor John Mullan, author of the indispensable little book What Matters in Austen?, is in no doubt that Jane never had sex, but he is equally certain that she was not naive. “If you read closely – and I mean closely – her letters you’ll find she was very aware of people having sexual relationships outside marriage,” he says. Which isn’t surprising, given the relatively pragmatic approach of the society of the time to these things; she wasn’t a Victorian, remember.
Indeed, one chapter of his book is called “Is there sex in Austen?”, to which the obvious answer is: yes. As he observes, the little minx Lydia Bennet is one of the very few women in the fiction of this period or the following who had sex before marriage, enjoyed it and didn’t die, become a prostitute or emigrate to Australia afterwards.
One reason that Jane Austen is so good on passion is that it’s unconsummated (at least for most of the narrative), expressed in gestures, changes of colour, glances and averted glances – and punctuation (Prof Mullan observes that you can tell a lot about sexual emotion from her use of dashes).
One of the most highly charged episodes in English fiction is in Austen’s novel Emma, where Mr Knightley seizes the heroine’s hand and seems as if he intends to kiss it, but doesn’t; he’s too overcome by his feelings. And the reason why Mr Darcy is so sexually attractive – way more so than the nice Mr Bingley – is the suggestion of repressed passion: he feels compelled to propose to Elizabeth, despite her unsuitability, because he wants to have her. Jane Austen is quite familiar with the erotic charge of opposites attracting (as in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing); plainly, being a virgin isn’t a bar to understanding desire.
There’s one other respect in which Jane Austen’s single, sexless life fed her fiction. As Professor Mullan points out, if she had married and had had lots of children, she wouldn’t have been able to write the books. Jane’s loss; our gain.