Jane Austen died a virgin, says Worsley
Lack of sex in author’s novels reflect absence in spinster’s own life, suggests TV historian
In the world of Jane Austen, passion is conveyed by a meaningful glance or a letter declaring undying devotion. For her heroines, there is no risk of sex. According to historian Lucy Worsley, who has studied her diaries and letters, the reason is simple: novelists write about what they know, and Austen died a virgin. “Did the spinster Jane Austen ever have sex with a man? The answer is almost certainly not, in my belief,” she said.
IN THE world of Jane Austen, passion is conveyed by a meaningful glance or a letter declaring undying devotion.
For her heroines, there is no risk of sex. According to Lucy Worsley, the reason for this is simple: novelists write about what they know, and Austen died a virgin.
The historian has studied Austen’s personal life, including the diaries and letters in which she wrote of her feelings for various suitors, and concluded that she remained chaste. “Did the spinster Jane Austen ever have sex with a man? The answer is almost certainly not, in my belief,” she said.
It was a class issue: Austen was a member of the “pseudogentry”, for whom sex was out of bounds. Her father was a rector on a modest income.
“Women lower down the social scale [than Austen] might very often have sex before marriage. It has been estimated that one-third of brides went to the altar pregnant. In the aristocracy, they took affairs pretty lightly.
“But as Jane was so economically and emotionally dependent on her family, if she’d had pregnancy outside marriage it would have been world-shattering,” she said. That was partly because she grew up in what Worsley, right, called “a mandrought” caused by the Napoleonic Wars, and partly because she had a fear of childbirth. The novelist lost three of her sisters-in-law to childbirth. Worsley, who is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, was speaking at a lecture at the Hay Festival. She has written a book, Jane Austen at Home, about the houses in which Austen lived until her death in 1817, aged 41. “Over her lifetime, Jane was what we would call ‘downwardly mobile’,” she said. Austen died in a “cramped city centre flat”, but it is Worsley’s belief that she was not heartbroken by the lack of a husband – rather, she spent her last years writing. Elsewhere at the festival, the novelist Colm Toibin said Austen’s books compared favourably with those produced by modern writers. “You can’t read any book now without suddenly chapter two taking you back to where everybody was 20 years ago. How did their parents meet, or where their grandparents were,” Toibin said. “The lovely business of Pride and Prejudice is the way it moves forward. I do not want to know how Mrs Bennet and Mr Bennet met. It’s the lovely business of: you don’t know.
“Add it yourself … If Jane Austen could do without flashbacks, could the rest of us, please?”