People sometimes think or say that there's no sex in Jane Austen and indeed
sometimes TV and film adapters feel the need to put it in, but it's there
actually. Reading between the lines, it's really clear in Pride and Prejudice that
Lydia Bennet has been off for over a month, and she's only just 16, living in
an apartment in London with a well-known rake and she's been living
with him. And she comes back to Longbourn full of fondness for him and it is a
picture of, a kind of sexual infatucatuion, a teenage sexual infatuation. And
we're to think of this when we sometimes are invited to read between the lines of
what is going on, or what has gone on in Jane Austen's novels. In Sense and
Sensibility,
for instance, there's the both kind of chilling and hilarious
sketch of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer and Mr. Palmer has, because he has,
Elinor realizes, this odd prejudice in favour of attractive young women, he's
married an idiot. And of course he's with her forever, if he's a gentleman. There's
no divorce, I mean, I often think liberal divorce laws may have been
good for society, but they were a disaster for the English novel because
you've got to make these decisions forever and you make them on
the basis sometimes of not knowing the other person very well at all and Mr.
Palmer has married Mrs. Palmer and clearly they have a happy married life
in one way. She's pregnant actually in the first part of Sense and Sensibility,
but as she sort of enjoys saying 'you can't get rid of me now'. Mr. Bennett - why
has he such a fool as Mrs. Bennet? Why has such
a witty and intelligent man married her? Well, he married her when she was young, we're
later told and attractive and if you're a gentleman, the only way you get to
sleep with the woman you fancy is by marrying her.
Even Mr. Darcy's famously disastrous first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet has, I
think we're supposed to infer, sexual passion behind it. He says 'you must allow
me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you'.
'Ardently'. And then he goes on to tell her all the reasons why it's a bad idea that
that he should marry her, but he's got to marry her, he's got to have her. You know, I mean
he can only get her by marrying her even though the marriage is, from his haughty
point of view, very unwise. So I think you feel the sexual passion in his
blundering approach. So sexual desire is there. You're expected to understand
it's there. It's there even, actually, funnily enough in that probably the
most famous sentence that Jane Austen ever wrote: 'It is a truth universally
acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in
want of a wife'. And people don't, kind of, always pick up on that last part of it.
'In want of', needs a wife, but 'wants' a wife. They want a wife because, if you're Mr.
Bingley, the only way you can have a sex life is by getting married. Mr. Elton in
Emma, the ghastly, smooth-talking Mr. Elton who is living alone and not much
liking it, we're told by the novel. He wants a wife because, of course he wants
the status and perhaps he wants children, I doubt it with Mr. Elton, but
he wants a sex life and Jane Austen expects her readers to understand that
without actually having to be explicit about it.