![]() ![]() But read on, because that particular door was only open “by the very tiniest crack, and only in the absence of evidence either way”. But this was an age where women very often shared beds, and Jane herself frequently records sleeping with a female friend.” And, she admits, at a time when many did not believe sex between women was possible, the “door of possibility may remain ajar”. “Here the stakes would have been much lower. “Did Jane ever have lesbian sex?” she asks in a much-misquoted passage. ![]() Adding the fact that Georgian contraception was as reliable as the rhythm method and chaperones kept single women tightly superintended, any opportunity for Austen to have sex would have been as undesirable as it was unlikely. ![]() From unwed Bennet sister Lydia running off with wicked Mr Wickham in Pride and Prejudice to Willoughby’s seduction of Colonel Brandon’s 15-year-old ward in Sense and Sensibility, it is clear that sex outside marriage meant ruination for the middle-class woman. You only have to read Austen novels to know this. Worsley’s point about Austen’s virginal status, made at the Hay festival on Saturday, was a tongue-in-cheek rhetorical point to emphasise that, for 18th-century middle-class “spinsters” like Austen, the sexual freedom enjoyed by single women at either end of the social scale – be they aristocrats or paupers – were off limits. But does that mean Worsley believes she had sex with women (or “lesbian sex”, as it has been breathlessly reported by national newspapers)? Well, no. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |