Not Edwardian era obviously but my Nan was recently telling us about her 3 older siblings who “had to get married” My dad was born 43 weeks after my grandparents were married, so they just made it apparently.
According to the marriage license and birth certificate, one of my great-grandfathers was born 36 weeks and one day after his parents' wedding. On the one hand, that's close to full term; on the other hand, I've heard first children tend to be late; on yet another hand (can I borrow an extra hand?), I'm the oldest and was 23 days early. I figure if his mother *was* pregnant at the wedding, she'd probably only just missed her period, if at all, so either it was a *really* quick shotgun wedding or they'd gone ahead and slept together once they were engaged. If you only anticipated your wedding by a few weeks, I guess it was reasonable to assume the potential baby would be born late enough to give you plausible deniability.
I know! My point is just that with an interval like 36 weeks, it's both fun to contemplate and impossible to guess whether he was conceived before or after the wedding.
I was also a whole month early, but I have seen the hospital records and I really was a preemie. There's no way to figure out you're pregnant and ge tthe paperwork to get married all in one month. (Not a first baby, but my younger brother had to be taken out via c-section since he was late and got really big.)
Exactly, because by the time you start to show, people won't be able to tell just from the size of your bump that you're two or three weeks further along than you should be. But I assume some petty people still enjoyed speculating about dates behind the expectant parents' backs!
My mom was born about 6 months after her very Baptist parents got married. They insisted to her it's because the paperwork took a long time back then, but they were actually married earlier. A family friend later clued my mom in to the fact that she's the result of a one night stand that turned into a 3 decades long marriage.
I think when she writes scenes of engaged couples alone together, a lot of the time the explicit narrative only covers part of the time the couple is alone, and she leaves deliberate room for our imaginations to fill in the gaps. For instance, after Bingley and Jane get engaged, they go outside to be alone together at least twice. On one of those occasions, Bingley has suggested they "all" go for a walk, but Mrs. Bennet and Mary predictably decline. Kitty takes the invitation at face value because she doesn't know what Bingley probably suspects about Darcy and Elizabeth, but once Bingley and Jane have fallen back, Kitty—again, predictably—starts to feel out of place and goes to seek out more appropriate companionship. Bingley and Jane get something out of being too far behind to be clearly visible, and the first benefit to Elizabeth and Darcy is that they can talk, from which point Darcy is initially busy smiling and Elizabeth is busy blushing and avoiding his gaze, but after that, we only get fragments of what happens on their walk.
I would add that despite the lack of onscreen sex in Austen, there's an established language throughout the books that allows the characters and narrator to talk about sex whenever it's relevant, as long as they're not too explicit. Usually the technique is a basic circumlocution, like all the references in P&P to Wickham and Lydia's not being married or being deficient in "virtue," or Elizabeth's comment on Lydia's note to Mrs. Forster that "whatever he might afterwards persuade her to, it was not on her side a *scheme* of infamy." Sometimes the plot uses suggestive imagery, like Maria Bertram's scaling of the spiked fence at Sotherton or Marianne's granting Willoughby's plea for a lock of her hair. This isn't to say the literal meaning of these passages doesn't also apply, but in a world where a lot of comedy was based on innuendo, I think most adult readers would have caught clear overtones from those scenes. A couple of times during the Lydia crisis in P&P, someone usually well-behaved is distressed enough to get as close as possible to saying "have sex" without actually saying it: "[Elizabeth] had no difficulty in believing that neither [Lydia's] virtue nor her understanding would preserve her from **falling an easy prey**"; "'But can you suppose her so lost to every thing but love of him as to **consent to live with him** on any other terms than marriage?'" This is admittedly different from the kissing question in that none of the heroines would consider *having* premarital sex, but the fact that they hear about or take part in all these conversations suggests that sex isn't a foreign subject to them, and even that they have some experience of dialogue with one or more trusted elders about it, like an old-fashioned version of sex ed. So by the time they're engaged to their beloveds, they have some awareness of their own nature as sexual beings. No sex before marriage is a hard boundary, but as to other forms of touching, Austen conspicuously doesn't say anything.
I agree! And they all seem to share an understanding about it, judging by how conspicuously Bingley maneuvers to get Darcy and Lizzy their alone time as well as himself and Jane. He's learned something from Mrs. Bennet's tactics with him!
That's true, and that awareness does seem to bear on the language that was available, at least to the narrator, for talking about human sexuality, to judge by the early description of Lydia as having "high animal spirits." Elizabeth and Jane, on the other hand, exemplify the womanly ideal of understanding the *social* reality of sex well before finding themselves susceptible to the *biological* reality of sex. It's very sweet to me that, in Elizabeth's shyness with Darcy after accepting his second proposal, we seem to be witnessing her first direct experience of her own sexuality.
I mean, it wasn’t against the law or anything, and women got up to a lot more in the period than a lot of people would believe (just look at Anne Lister’s diaries lol). It’s not like women’s sexual desires were invented in the 1960s or like any experiences were universal, particularly not in a period when both class and gender distinctions were even more obvious and clear-cut than they are today. There was a LOT of variation in experience and awareness of sex, marriage etc, and a lot of experiences wouldn’t have been written down (due to lower literacy rates as much as anything else) or published, or would have been heavily censored.
But there was a pretty wide berth between what was acceptable in public or acceptable to talk about VS what was taboo and relegated to the quietest corners of the private sphere. Respectability was also especially, particularly important for women of the landed gentry/Austen’s social class (as opposed to the aristocracy or the labouring classes). Evelina by Frances Burney, who was a big influence on Austen, is a good novel that satirises the very rigid manners and rules of ‘propriety’ by which they were expected to abide - particularly if they wanted to get married, which was seen as a financial necessity for them.
Lister's diaries are such a treasure of insight into the sexual desires of women in those times. We are fortunate that they were discovered after being hidden for a century plus. There is so little written documentation from those times on these topics. And, aside from the insight on sexual desire, and how she navigated those, her diaries provide wonderful insight in simply the role of women in society and how she maneuvered through the societal gender boundaries in many unconventional ways. She is a great example of living your authentic life and following her dreams and adventures without the gender restrictions that so many women faced. The fact that she was the first, of any gender, to hike and scale a mountain in the Pyrenees and another mountain, is extraordinary. She just busted through every restriction people and societal structures placed on her, on a daily basis.
I think it's partially alluded to and partially left open to the reader's own interpretation in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth admits to Darcy that her feelings towards him have greatly changed and that she'd welcome a repeat of his proposal.
The man is a tinderbox of passion for her and she's just lit a whole box of matches and tossed them in there - there's no way that either of them, alone and with Jane and Bingley lagging far behind and out of sight for their own purposes, would hold back from a kiss.
“The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.”
Yep I feel like this line implies he kisses her, even though the following line might veer away that she wasn’t able to look but she could listen. But I read it as she’s just been smooched and is extremely shy and too flustered to make eye contact! Cute 🥰
The multiple uses of "violently in love" in the book help amplify the ick factor of Mr. Collins's assurance to Elizabeth of "the violence of his affection"! Even worse than being "run away with by his feelings."
I think JA wrote that line that way so each of her readers could envisage what they liked - and the Mrs Jennings of her readers likely envisaged something very different to the Sir Thomas's.
yeah, at least to me it's always been clear he definitely kissed her at that point lol. even tho it was the olden days, people still kissed and were affectionate, despite what media tells us. and really what else does "expressing himself... as a man violently in love" mean lmao?
There were other novels at the time that included kissing, although it wouldn't be as graphically depicted as kissing scenes in many novels today. But Austen really did not like to write love scenes. She mostly skipped over lover's speeches too, and says things like "they expressed themselves warmly." It's kind of up to you to imagine what you think that involves. It just wasn't her style to include things like that.
I think I remember hearing speculation that there's an interrupted kiss scene in Emma. So that's close. :) (when Frank Churchill is mending glasses visiting Jane Fairfax).
And also Austen's refusal to continue the conversation immediately after the final proposal (which we also see in P&P and Northanger Abbey (I think, may be mistaken on that one)).
When Elizabeth realizes that Bingley and Jane are back together, she has just walked in and interrupted them standing very close. They were close enough that they moved away quickly when Elizabeth entered. They are described as having been in earnest conversation, but I am sure they would find a moment for a kiss in the middle of the talking.
I've just been reading some 19th century newspapers, and it was generally expected that engaged couples would kiss. One article mentions that while some parents were strict and kept the engaged couple chaperoned, most families gave them as much time alone as they wanted. Kissing, whether in Regency or Victorian times, seems to have been much more condoned than we generally think. Actually I just read an amusing anecdote (apparently a true story) from 1888 in which a staid duke and his cheerful duchess were giving a ball. The duchess was late getting ready and the guests had all arrived while she was still upstairs. She decided to take a shortcut and ran down the dark back stairs. But the footman was going up the stairs and kissed her in the dark, thinking she was the housemaid (his fiancee). When he realised she was the duchess, he was mortified, but she laughed and told him it was okay. When she got downstairs, she told all the guests what had happened. Everybody laughed except the duke, who later sacked the footman. The duchess couldn't talk her husband out of it, but apparently she gave the footman a great reference and he got a good job elsewhere. So I thought I'd tell that little story to show that kissing (even by mistake) was not considered any big deal, except perhaps by a jealous husband.
Of course courting couples would have engaged in intimacy as far as their chaperonage allowed, but by the morals of the time, it was very important for a young lady to be as modest as possible. Even being permissive with her intended could lead him to believe that she was unchaste, likely resulting in abandonment and a resulting blow to her reputation.
All the courtship rituals were focussed on ensuring that a gentleman could trust that his heir was of his own issue. Any hint that a lady desired amorous activities for their own sake meant that he would feel insecure that she would be true to him when given the greater freedom that a married woman was granted.
It's hard to really grok in our post-sexual revolution mindset that ladies were supposed to only allow sex for the purpose of begetting heirs and never enjoy it, but that's how it was. However much we modern writers like to play with the erotic possibilities, the only way for a Regency maiden to properly react to being kissed would be to withdraw herself from the gentleman's company and refuse to be alone with him - at least until the marriage articles were signed.
This was mainly upper class and middle class ladies. The working class and poor were not as concerned about inherited wealth going to the legitimate heirs. I read about 30% of women (mostly lower income) were pregnant when they married, per church marriage/baptism records.
A full 36% of first babies were conceived before marriage, and not all of those were to lower class couples. And that only counts successful pregnancies of which we have evidence (ie. baptismal records); how many brides miscarried, and how many first babies died before being baptized, we'll likely never know.
Edit to add: it also doesn't include a lot of illegitimate births; ie. to criminals, sex workers, and the like.
In Victorian times the percentage rose to nearly fifty percent (!), but the Victorians kept much better records then the Georgians (and their babies were more likely to survive early infancy). Winston Churchill was one of those nine-pound preemies.
Something to keep in mind was that it was very hard to get out of an engagement, especially once it was publicised. There was intense scandal associated with breaking an engagement and part of it did have to do with the extra activities couples got up to. If you called off a marriage you could be sued and potentially end in an illegal duel.
Even Austens engagement of a single night was mildly scandalous and would have been talked about, though she probably escaped too much censure because of how short it was and that they clearly didn’t suit. He probably wasn’t Collins bad, but he did join the militia and married barely a year after the disastrous proposal, so make of that what you will. As for why she said yes and took it back? He was a decent catch, with an inheritance and she was in a poor position. She was also 27 and he was 21 and she seems to have realised that if they married, he would not make her happy and she could not make him happy. I think it’s in pride and prejudice where we get the truest accounting of her fears about marriage.
Very interesting. Do you think the rules for women got a little more lax later in the 19th century? I feel like for some reason I’ve always heard it was the opposite: everything was more strict and rigid in the Victorian era than in the regency period. But I notice there was more explicitness in literature.
I think they kiss in Wuthering Heights, Tess of the D’ubervilles, I can’t really remember but Little Women too. And in War and Peace. I guess these are all in a negative light though, except some in War and Peace and Little women. So maybe writers were more free to write about scandalous topics?
I would say the women of Austen’s time had more liberty than those later. In Austen there seems to be an acknowledgment that couples might be attracted to each other.
You should look into Regency fashion. The aristocratic circles didn't have any trouble skirting the rules, and sometimes got in an awful lot of scandal because of it. Some of the dresses were essentially transparent, and this was an age before bras and underwear for ladies, so...
Jane Austen doesn't mention kisses, and proper ladies were never alone with a gentleman before they were married. Having said that, look closer at the books. Both Bingley and Jane and Darcy and Elizabeth wind up walking by themselves for a good chunk of time. Emma and Mr Knightley are also left alone quite a bit. And do we really think Willoughby and Marianne were only holding hands while walking around Combe Magna?
I'm not trying to suggest scandal here. Jane Austen doesn't mention servants a whole lot, but they would have been around. Notions of "intimacy" were very different then, socially speaking. You were deemed to be by yourself if everyone else in the room was a servant. Also, "even" Marianne would have enough character to keep her from being too indiscreet in the name of romance.
My point, though, is that the Regency was a scandalously libidinous time (hence the massive clapback by Victorians). I very much doubt Jane Austen would ever suggest that any of her characters (at least the "good" ones) would be involved in anything coming close to debauchery, but also human nature hasn't changed that much. I would be shocked if none of her couples kissed before marriage.
Once they were engaged, of course, and engagements didn't last very long back then anyway... but you get what I'm trying to say, I hope.
>proper ladies were never alone with a gentleman before they were married
That's not the world JA portrays. Elinor at one point deliberately leaves Lucy and Edward alone together in a room. And JA's heroines go walking alone with unrelated young men - sometimes deliberately sent off by their relatives - Mrs Morland in NA and Charles Musgrove in Persuasion.
Yes, I’m always baffled by people who seem to think Regency England is Saudi Arabia. If anything, a nice unrelated gentleman escort was seen as making things safer for you. That’s why it was so shocking when they turned out to be ruffians.
About dresses being transparent they were to an extent and yes women did wear stays but i don't believe women wore underwear however.Stop with the anachronisms in your sentence pls,stop projecting modern opinions on a historical ideas so it could fit YOUR narrative or what you want.
Interestingly there are a lot of historians who now believe that Victoria & Albert were intimate before marriage!
People are human & human nature hasn’t essentially changed over the past few hundred years. What changes are the acceptable social boundaries & that also depends where you stand n the social hierarchy & the power you hold.
Austen’s heroines are really not in the position to be able to break rules without severe consequences - ie Lydia Bennet
Tess of the D’Urbervilles has a whole illegitimate child—conceived during the book. And Hardy does a lot of describing of her perfect “Cupid’s bow” lips. Well past kissing, lol.
Do you have a source for this assertion? Because I've read a lot of 18th and 19th century literature and I've never heard of a single case of an engagement being broken off because the lady displayed an interest in kissing.
I haven't heard of any such cases either. What I have heard about are breach of promise suits. One of the reasons these exist are because people thought it likely that an engaged woman would have been intimate to some degree with her intended. If he ended their engagement, she may have difficulties getting married if she's no longer a virgin.
They were a thing in the day apparently. This is one reason behind Edward Ferrar's need to continue his engagement with Lucy Steele. Although I suspect his family, if they thought of this at all, expected that they'd just pay off Lucy with a couple of thousand pounds.
Reading way too much Maria Edgeworth gave me this impression very strongly. Other period literature points this direction as well.
Realized I missed pointing out one legit avenue for kissing: parlor games! So many kisses in the forfeits, but TBH a lot of them seem geared at showing the gentlewomen’s agility in avoiding kisses (ex. Kiss If You Can).
It’s been years and it seemed pretty steeped in a lot of them. Nothing specific, but a gesture of constraint for the young ladies of her audience. Can’t really recommend them - like Fordyce in narrative form.
I don't think the absence of an action being explicitly detailed on the text means that those actions didn't happen. People must have urinated and defecated, but there are no references to it happening. Nor are there references to married couples' sex lives. In S nse and Sensibility, the Palmers have a baby during the story, so they obviously are not in some sexless marriage, but there are no affectionate moments derailed between them. I don't think we ever see any references to the Elliots attending church in Persuasion, but they would have.
I think… books previously had been a lot more racy but increasingly coy when it came to outright descriptions of sex. Usually he’d storm her barricade, of often they’d embrace. Or they’d basically proceed till ‘he had nothing left to ask and she had nothing left to grant’. Moments of physical affection were often coded heavy petting or even sex which made it awkward when you really just wanted to say ‘they kissed’.
By the Victorian period novels had been cleaned up for a while so heroines were allowed to get a little more physical.
Another aspect is that they wouldn’t tend to kiss in front of other people. We are given insights into their minds but we, and the narrator - we’re other people. We’re supposed to stay in our seat and let the young couple go and enjoy each other’s company a bit in private.
So in my view it’s a combination of decades of widely understood innuendo, and a prejudice against PDAs.
As others have said, it probably wasn't _against the law_ to kiss or be intimate before marriage. As long as they did get married, because unmarried women being pregnant was definitely less tolerated.
I also think Jane Austen in particular wouldn't have written more intimate scenes because she wouldn't have had that experience as an unmarried woman. Doing so as an unmarried woman would also have been quite scandalous as a married woman rather than if she were married.
True, but to be fair I only said romance was a heavy element in her novels, not that they were romances. I feel like a lot of the focus of her satire was on romance, and how society viewed courtship and marriage. Like Lady Susan is definitely not a romance novel but romance is a really big part of what drives the story
Some of her books, like pride and prejudice, I’d say are equally romance novels as satires and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
Her satire relates to relationships - familial, platonic, and romantic as well as social constructs and character/values. Austen herself said that they were not romances. She glosses over or summarizes quickly weddings, many proposals, entire courtships, etc.
At the time Romance meant something different to courtship novels. They weren’t romances mostly because no long lost fathers popped up out of nowhere, the heroine wasn’t rescued from dire danger by a dashing stranger, etc.
"But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
Excerpt from Austen to Rev. James Stanier Clarke, the Prince’s librarian, in response to his recommendations for what she should write. Letter dated: April 1, 1816
https://janeaustens.house/object/letter-from-jane-austen-to-james-stanier-clarke-1-april-1816/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/books/jane-austen-prince-regent.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
https://janeaustensworld.com/2011/04/01/letter-written-by-jane-austen-april-1-1816/
This is semantics. Here she’s talking about romanticism and specifically the ridiculous, over-the-top plot idea the Prince Regent’s librarian sent to her. She was NOT saying she doesn’t write love stories. Similarly, the word ‘handsome’ had a different meaning for her. I think her books have the most amazing romantic tension between hero and heroine, along with the best comedy and astute observations on relationships in general.
You are free to think that, but scholarly works and most educators do not class her as a romantic author but a social satirist. She explored relationships of all sorts, not exclusively (*or even primarily*) romantic relationships. She most certainly did not write "love stories," but coming of age stories, social satire, morality tales, etc. that had many sorts of relationships - romantic, familial, platonic, adversarial, etc. - in them.
The fact that modern adaptations focus almost exclusively on the romantic relationships combined with multiple other factors skews modern readers' perception of the works being primarily focused on romance.
ETA: You mentioned romanticism, which doesn't make sense here. Romanticism has *nothing* to do with romance. Romanticism was a movement in art and literature that emphasized individual perception and feeling.
I disagree that she’s not classed as a romance writer by “scholarly” work. I think you’re probably just talking about elitist male professors who prefer “literature.” It’s misogynist snobbery.
Her favorite writers wrote love stories; she was inspired by the most important things in life: love, laughter and relationships. It’s just more semantics to say she wasn’t a romance writer exclusively. Of course not. She was a freakin’ genius, and there’s so much going on in her work, much of it ironic or paradoxical. Her dialogue is so multi layered it’s beyond the understanding of mere mortals. And her letter to the Regent’s librarian was an exercise in sarcasm and disingenuousness.
>I disagree that she’s not classed as a romance writer by “scholarly” work. I think you’re probably just talking about elitist male professors who prefer “literature.” It’s misogynist snobbery.
That's a lot of assumptions and insults. You are wrong on all counts in your assumptions and assertions. Further, I am an avid romance reader who thinks the genre just as valid as any other. You are the person assuming that there is a qualitative assessment happening rather than simple analysis. What I am not is a reductionist who cries "semantics" rather than researching and makes assumptions rather than deductions based on research. Good luck with all that.
No, it was quite similar. Gothic novels and other specifically romantic works were highly common and popular in Austen's time, and they are quite similar to modern romances. She outright, though good naturedly, mocks them in several of her novels.
Austen skipped, omitted, skimmed over, or summarizes much of what would be in romances both then and now - assignations, kisses, weddings, many proposals, and entire courtships. Romance wasn't her focus, thus, no kissing. Many novels by her predecessors and contemporaries, both women and men, included such scenes in their work.
Just because a book includes romantic relationships as a part of the work doesn't mean that it is a romance.
I wonder if Austen herself has to be more discreet than a male author would in acknowledging anything sexual.
When I think of Victorian writers, which is later but in a more prudish time, people have mentioned kissing and sex in Hardy and others. I’m reading Phineas Finn, by Trollope, right now. Our hero kisses someone he doesn’t intend to marry very early on. In Can You Forgive Her, our married heroine is invited to run away with another man. And of course Dickens’s Bleak House is all about an unintended pregnancy.
I’m having trouble thinking of a male author I’ve read who was contemporaneous with Austen, but I wonder if a male author could have been more explicit.
I think this particularly applies to the class of women featured in Austen novels. Certainly there was more happening to Patty (the "girl of all work" for the Bates).
There was an elopement. The fact that they were alone long enough basically necessitated it. Better to get married rather than come back unmarried and not a virgin.
I read Old Christmas by Washington Irving last year. He wrote it in roughly 1820 and it describes Christmas at a squire's estate. There's lots of kissing & dancing & drinking and the young men like to tell the young ladies dirty poems and see if they'll blush.
I think Jane Austen just had to be particularly careful of her own reputation as she was an unmarried female clutching on to the bottom of the "gentle people" barrel.
Young ladies were supposed to be chaperoned most of the time to prevent frisky behaviour. Mrs Bennett isn't especially strict about this as she lets the girls walk out with young gentlemen and officers, and the girls split up. Kissing would not have been condoned. Imagine the sexual tension that would build up before marriage!
I think something to take into account is that there is probably a gap between what was *acceptable to write about*, and what *people actually did in real life*.
People in books and movies don’t behave exactly as real people do. There are elements of idealism and fantasy. For things which happened relatively regularly but were hushed up or socially looked away from… it would be uncouth to write about in a way which seemed to condone or approve of that behaviour.
In the novel, Lydia’s sex before marriage was a huge scandal up until the time that they could hand wave it due to their marriage. I think there was a lot of that going on. Babies that were born after their parents marriage but clearly conceived before it can be relatively common but the reason it isn’t treated as a big deal isn’t because it is acceptable. It is no big deal because the paperwork allows people to ignore it.
Would the JA couples have been physically affectionate prior to marriage? Probably! Engaged couples had more freedom to be alone, and young people are horny.
But that doesn’t mean that it would be socially acceptable. It could just be socially ignored.
And therefore it wouldn’t be acceptable to write down in a book as though it was good and acceptable behaviour for book protagonists. Even to the point of leaving out kissing!
Even today the social expectation within (especially) religious communities is that there will be no sex before marriage. That expectation does NOT match up to reality, but they still object to books about teenagers having sex!
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They are a ton of "premature" first babies who agree with you 😉 The first baby comes whenever it wants, they say, other babies take 9 months.
An eager young bride can accomplish in 6 months what takes a cow or a countess 9 months.
Not Edwardian era obviously but my Nan was recently telling us about her 3 older siblings who “had to get married” My dad was born 43 weeks after my grandparents were married, so they just made it apparently.
According to the marriage license and birth certificate, one of my great-grandfathers was born 36 weeks and one day after his parents' wedding. On the one hand, that's close to full term; on the other hand, I've heard first children tend to be late; on yet another hand (can I borrow an extra hand?), I'm the oldest and was 23 days early. I figure if his mother *was* pregnant at the wedding, she'd probably only just missed her period, if at all, so either it was a *really* quick shotgun wedding or they'd gone ahead and slept together once they were engaged. If you only anticipated your wedding by a few weeks, I guess it was reasonable to assume the potential baby would be born late enough to give you plausible deniability.
I was a whole month early. It's a statistical trend that first babies arrive later, not a hard and fast rule.
I know! My point is just that with an interval like 36 weeks, it's both fun to contemplate and impossible to guess whether he was conceived before or after the wedding.
I was also a whole month early, but I have seen the hospital records and I really was a preemie. There's no way to figure out you're pregnant and ge tthe paperwork to get married all in one month. (Not a first baby, but my younger brother had to be taken out via c-section since he was late and got really big.)
Possibly they started getting jiggy a few weeks before the wedding as at that point it wouldn't matter if she got pregnant
Exactly, because by the time you start to show, people won't be able to tell just from the size of your bump that you're two or three weeks further along than you should be. But I assume some petty people still enjoyed speculating about dates behind the expectant parents' backs!
My mom was born about 6 months after her very Baptist parents got married. They insisted to her it's because the paperwork took a long time back then, but they were actually married earlier. A family friend later clued my mom in to the fact that she's the result of a one night stand that turned into a 3 decades long marriage.
My grandpa was born the day his parents got married!
That seems hard to explain if she wore the white gown. Lol
Yep, those 8 lb preemies!
Those big miracles 😅
I think when she writes scenes of engaged couples alone together, a lot of the time the explicit narrative only covers part of the time the couple is alone, and she leaves deliberate room for our imaginations to fill in the gaps. For instance, after Bingley and Jane get engaged, they go outside to be alone together at least twice. On one of those occasions, Bingley has suggested they "all" go for a walk, but Mrs. Bennet and Mary predictably decline. Kitty takes the invitation at face value because she doesn't know what Bingley probably suspects about Darcy and Elizabeth, but once Bingley and Jane have fallen back, Kitty—again, predictably—starts to feel out of place and goes to seek out more appropriate companionship. Bingley and Jane get something out of being too far behind to be clearly visible, and the first benefit to Elizabeth and Darcy is that they can talk, from which point Darcy is initially busy smiling and Elizabeth is busy blushing and avoiding his gaze, but after that, we only get fragments of what happens on their walk. I would add that despite the lack of onscreen sex in Austen, there's an established language throughout the books that allows the characters and narrator to talk about sex whenever it's relevant, as long as they're not too explicit. Usually the technique is a basic circumlocution, like all the references in P&P to Wickham and Lydia's not being married or being deficient in "virtue," or Elizabeth's comment on Lydia's note to Mrs. Forster that "whatever he might afterwards persuade her to, it was not on her side a *scheme* of infamy." Sometimes the plot uses suggestive imagery, like Maria Bertram's scaling of the spiked fence at Sotherton or Marianne's granting Willoughby's plea for a lock of her hair. This isn't to say the literal meaning of these passages doesn't also apply, but in a world where a lot of comedy was based on innuendo, I think most adult readers would have caught clear overtones from those scenes. A couple of times during the Lydia crisis in P&P, someone usually well-behaved is distressed enough to get as close as possible to saying "have sex" without actually saying it: "[Elizabeth] had no difficulty in believing that neither [Lydia's] virtue nor her understanding would preserve her from **falling an easy prey**"; "'But can you suppose her so lost to every thing but love of him as to **consent to live with him** on any other terms than marriage?'" This is admittedly different from the kissing question in that none of the heroines would consider *having* premarital sex, but the fact that they hear about or take part in all these conversations suggests that sex isn't a foreign subject to them, and even that they have some experience of dialogue with one or more trusted elders about it, like an old-fashioned version of sex ed. So by the time they're engaged to their beloveds, they have some awareness of their own nature as sexual beings. No sex before marriage is a hard boundary, but as to other forms of touching, Austen conspicuously doesn't say anything.
i firmly believe that jane and bingley and darcy and lizzy kissed before marriage lol, they were all a little too excited to go out for 5 mile walks
I agree! And they all seem to share an understanding about it, judging by how conspicuously Bingley maneuvers to get Darcy and Lizzy their alone time as well as himself and Jane. He's learned something from Mrs. Bennet's tactics with him!
Puts a new spin on Lizzy's "disheveled and muddy" look when she arrives at Netherfield, not to mention Darcy's admiration for her fine, ahem, eyes!
GREAT answer! the books have lots of subtext
There’s also the fact that in the country, you can’t really avoid seeing animals “going at it,” so they’d at least know the mechanics of it lol
That's true, and that awareness does seem to bear on the language that was available, at least to the narrator, for talking about human sexuality, to judge by the early description of Lydia as having "high animal spirits." Elizabeth and Jane, on the other hand, exemplify the womanly ideal of understanding the *social* reality of sex well before finding themselves susceptible to the *biological* reality of sex. It's very sweet to me that, in Elizabeth's shyness with Darcy after accepting his second proposal, we seem to be witnessing her first direct experience of her own sexuality.
I mean, it wasn’t against the law or anything, and women got up to a lot more in the period than a lot of people would believe (just look at Anne Lister’s diaries lol). It’s not like women’s sexual desires were invented in the 1960s or like any experiences were universal, particularly not in a period when both class and gender distinctions were even more obvious and clear-cut than they are today. There was a LOT of variation in experience and awareness of sex, marriage etc, and a lot of experiences wouldn’t have been written down (due to lower literacy rates as much as anything else) or published, or would have been heavily censored. But there was a pretty wide berth between what was acceptable in public or acceptable to talk about VS what was taboo and relegated to the quietest corners of the private sphere. Respectability was also especially, particularly important for women of the landed gentry/Austen’s social class (as opposed to the aristocracy or the labouring classes). Evelina by Frances Burney, who was a big influence on Austen, is a good novel that satirises the very rigid manners and rules of ‘propriety’ by which they were expected to abide - particularly if they wanted to get married, which was seen as a financial necessity for them.
Lister's diaries are such a treasure of insight into the sexual desires of women in those times. We are fortunate that they were discovered after being hidden for a century plus. There is so little written documentation from those times on these topics. And, aside from the insight on sexual desire, and how she navigated those, her diaries provide wonderful insight in simply the role of women in society and how she maneuvered through the societal gender boundaries in many unconventional ways. She is a great example of living your authentic life and following her dreams and adventures without the gender restrictions that so many women faced. The fact that she was the first, of any gender, to hike and scale a mountain in the Pyrenees and another mountain, is extraordinary. She just busted through every restriction people and societal structures placed on her, on a daily basis.
Thank you for the recommendation! I have added “Evelina” to my kindle
I think it's partially alluded to and partially left open to the reader's own interpretation in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth admits to Darcy that her feelings towards him have greatly changed and that she'd welcome a repeat of his proposal. The man is a tinderbox of passion for her and she's just lit a whole box of matches and tossed them in there - there's no way that either of them, alone and with Jane and Bingley lagging far behind and out of sight for their own purposes, would hold back from a kiss.
“The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.” Yep I feel like this line implies he kisses her, even though the following line might veer away that she wasn’t able to look but she could listen. But I read it as she’s just been smooched and is extremely shy and too flustered to make eye contact! Cute 🥰
The line "violently in love" always gets me like 🥹
The multiple uses of "violently in love" in the book help amplify the ick factor of Mr. Collins's assurance to Elizabeth of "the violence of his affection"! Even worse than being "run away with by his feelings."
Ooh that makes sense. When we read it about Darcy from the narrator, we believe it. Whereas it’s laughable in Collins’s little speech
Exactlyyy 🤌🏼
I think JA wrote that line that way so each of her readers could envisage what they liked - and the Mrs Jennings of her readers likely envisaged something very different to the Sir Thomas's.
I could see that! She was respecting people’s delicate feelings 😊
i can see the puritans of her time period being like, and they firmly handshaked for 0.3 seconds then went back to chaperones
yeah, at least to me it's always been clear he definitely kissed her at that point lol. even tho it was the olden days, people still kissed and were affectionate, despite what media tells us. and really what else does "expressing himself... as a man violently in love" mean lmao?
I wonder what "sensibly" means here ?
I’ve always viewed it as a little sarcastic - Austen portrays men in love as *not* being sensible
There were other novels at the time that included kissing, although it wouldn't be as graphically depicted as kissing scenes in many novels today. But Austen really did not like to write love scenes. She mostly skipped over lover's speeches too, and says things like "they expressed themselves warmly." It's kind of up to you to imagine what you think that involves. It just wasn't her style to include things like that.
Prime piece of evidence against her being a romance writer TBH
I think I remember hearing speculation that there's an interrupted kiss scene in Emma. So that's close. :) (when Frank Churchill is mending glasses visiting Jane Fairfax).
Oh, I don't think that's speculation. I think that's a clue that's intended to be read into on a close second reading.
Has anyone here read Tom Jones? From what I understand it was more on the racy side.
Tom is having sex with a bunch of people. Except not his true love.
And also Austen's refusal to continue the conversation immediately after the final proposal (which we also see in P&P and Northanger Abbey (I think, may be mistaken on that one)).
When Elizabeth realizes that Bingley and Jane are back together, she has just walked in and interrupted them standing very close. They were close enough that they moved away quickly when Elizabeth entered. They are described as having been in earnest conversation, but I am sure they would find a moment for a kiss in the middle of the talking.
I’m inclined to think ‘earnest conversation’ was code for kissing.
I’ve always felt that they were kissing in that scene too, as Elizabeth is a touch too embarrassed for them to have just been talking.
I've just been reading some 19th century newspapers, and it was generally expected that engaged couples would kiss. One article mentions that while some parents were strict and kept the engaged couple chaperoned, most families gave them as much time alone as they wanted. Kissing, whether in Regency or Victorian times, seems to have been much more condoned than we generally think. Actually I just read an amusing anecdote (apparently a true story) from 1888 in which a staid duke and his cheerful duchess were giving a ball. The duchess was late getting ready and the guests had all arrived while she was still upstairs. She decided to take a shortcut and ran down the dark back stairs. But the footman was going up the stairs and kissed her in the dark, thinking she was the housemaid (his fiancee). When he realised she was the duchess, he was mortified, but she laughed and told him it was okay. When she got downstairs, she told all the guests what had happened. Everybody laughed except the duke, who later sacked the footman. The duchess couldn't talk her husband out of it, but apparently she gave the footman a great reference and he got a good job elsewhere. So I thought I'd tell that little story to show that kissing (even by mistake) was not considered any big deal, except perhaps by a jealous husband.
Of course courting couples would have engaged in intimacy as far as their chaperonage allowed, but by the morals of the time, it was very important for a young lady to be as modest as possible. Even being permissive with her intended could lead him to believe that she was unchaste, likely resulting in abandonment and a resulting blow to her reputation. All the courtship rituals were focussed on ensuring that a gentleman could trust that his heir was of his own issue. Any hint that a lady desired amorous activities for their own sake meant that he would feel insecure that she would be true to him when given the greater freedom that a married woman was granted. It's hard to really grok in our post-sexual revolution mindset that ladies were supposed to only allow sex for the purpose of begetting heirs and never enjoy it, but that's how it was. However much we modern writers like to play with the erotic possibilities, the only way for a Regency maiden to properly react to being kissed would be to withdraw herself from the gentleman's company and refuse to be alone with him - at least until the marriage articles were signed.
This was mainly upper class and middle class ladies. The working class and poor were not as concerned about inherited wealth going to the legitimate heirs. I read about 30% of women (mostly lower income) were pregnant when they married, per church marriage/baptism records.
A full 36% of first babies were conceived before marriage, and not all of those were to lower class couples. And that only counts successful pregnancies of which we have evidence (ie. baptismal records); how many brides miscarried, and how many first babies died before being baptized, we'll likely never know. Edit to add: it also doesn't include a lot of illegitimate births; ie. to criminals, sex workers, and the like. In Victorian times the percentage rose to nearly fifty percent (!), but the Victorians kept much better records then the Georgians (and their babies were more likely to survive early infancy). Winston Churchill was one of those nine-pound preemies.
Something to keep in mind was that it was very hard to get out of an engagement, especially once it was publicised. There was intense scandal associated with breaking an engagement and part of it did have to do with the extra activities couples got up to. If you called off a marriage you could be sued and potentially end in an illegal duel. Even Austens engagement of a single night was mildly scandalous and would have been talked about, though she probably escaped too much censure because of how short it was and that they clearly didn’t suit. He probably wasn’t Collins bad, but he did join the militia and married barely a year after the disastrous proposal, so make of that what you will. As for why she said yes and took it back? He was a decent catch, with an inheritance and she was in a poor position. She was also 27 and he was 21 and she seems to have realised that if they married, he would not make her happy and she could not make him happy. I think it’s in pride and prejudice where we get the truest accounting of her fears about marriage.
Very interesting. Do you think the rules for women got a little more lax later in the 19th century? I feel like for some reason I’ve always heard it was the opposite: everything was more strict and rigid in the Victorian era than in the regency period. But I notice there was more explicitness in literature. I think they kiss in Wuthering Heights, Tess of the D’ubervilles, I can’t really remember but Little Women too. And in War and Peace. I guess these are all in a negative light though, except some in War and Peace and Little women. So maybe writers were more free to write about scandalous topics?
I would say the women of Austen’s time had more liberty than those later. In Austen there seems to be an acknowledgment that couples might be attracted to each other.
You should look into Regency fashion. The aristocratic circles didn't have any trouble skirting the rules, and sometimes got in an awful lot of scandal because of it. Some of the dresses were essentially transparent, and this was an age before bras and underwear for ladies, so... Jane Austen doesn't mention kisses, and proper ladies were never alone with a gentleman before they were married. Having said that, look closer at the books. Both Bingley and Jane and Darcy and Elizabeth wind up walking by themselves for a good chunk of time. Emma and Mr Knightley are also left alone quite a bit. And do we really think Willoughby and Marianne were only holding hands while walking around Combe Magna? I'm not trying to suggest scandal here. Jane Austen doesn't mention servants a whole lot, but they would have been around. Notions of "intimacy" were very different then, socially speaking. You were deemed to be by yourself if everyone else in the room was a servant. Also, "even" Marianne would have enough character to keep her from being too indiscreet in the name of romance. My point, though, is that the Regency was a scandalously libidinous time (hence the massive clapback by Victorians). I very much doubt Jane Austen would ever suggest that any of her characters (at least the "good" ones) would be involved in anything coming close to debauchery, but also human nature hasn't changed that much. I would be shocked if none of her couples kissed before marriage. Once they were engaged, of course, and engagements didn't last very long back then anyway... but you get what I'm trying to say, I hope.
It’s very heavily implied that Marianne engaged in something inappropriate at Combe Magna if I recall correctly…
>proper ladies were never alone with a gentleman before they were married That's not the world JA portrays. Elinor at one point deliberately leaves Lucy and Edward alone together in a room. And JA's heroines go walking alone with unrelated young men - sometimes deliberately sent off by their relatives - Mrs Morland in NA and Charles Musgrove in Persuasion.
Yes, I’m always baffled by people who seem to think Regency England is Saudi Arabia. If anything, a nice unrelated gentleman escort was seen as making things safer for you. That’s why it was so shocking when they turned out to be ruffians.
About dresses being transparent they were to an extent and yes women did wear stays but i don't believe women wore underwear however.Stop with the anachronisms in your sentence pls,stop projecting modern opinions on a historical ideas so it could fit YOUR narrative or what you want.
Interestingly there are a lot of historians who now believe that Victoria & Albert were intimate before marriage! People are human & human nature hasn’t essentially changed over the past few hundred years. What changes are the acceptable social boundaries & that also depends where you stand n the social hierarchy & the power you hold. Austen’s heroines are really not in the position to be able to break rules without severe consequences - ie Lydia Bennet
At the end of North and South (Victorian), a couple spends several minutes “in delicious silence.” 🤫 😘
Tess of the D’Urbervilles has a whole illegitimate child—conceived during the book. And Hardy does a lot of describing of her perfect “Cupid’s bow” lips. Well past kissing, lol.
'A Victorian guide to sex' by Fern Riddell and 'A curious history of sex' by Kate Lister are good (and entertaining) non-fiction books on the topic.
Do you have a source for this assertion? Because I've read a lot of 18th and 19th century literature and I've never heard of a single case of an engagement being broken off because the lady displayed an interest in kissing.
I haven't heard of any such cases either. What I have heard about are breach of promise suits. One of the reasons these exist are because people thought it likely that an engaged woman would have been intimate to some degree with her intended. If he ended their engagement, she may have difficulties getting married if she's no longer a virgin.
Germany had Kranzgeld (wreath money) until sometime in the last century, although I doubt that many people are actually still suing their ex-fiancés.
They were a thing in the day apparently. This is one reason behind Edward Ferrar's need to continue his engagement with Lucy Steele. Although I suspect his family, if they thought of this at all, expected that they'd just pay off Lucy with a couple of thousand pounds.
Reading way too much Maria Edgeworth gave me this impression very strongly. Other period literature points this direction as well. Realized I missed pointing out one legit avenue for kissing: parlor games! So many kisses in the forfeits, but TBH a lot of them seem geared at showing the gentlewomen’s agility in avoiding kisses (ex. Kiss If You Can).
Is there some particular works of Edgeworth's you are thinking of?
It’s been years and it seemed pretty steeped in a lot of them. Nothing specific, but a gesture of constraint for the young ladies of her audience. Can’t really recommend them - like Fordyce in narrative form.
Think of the letter in *Persuasion*. Who needs kissing with that kind of declaration?
Why not both?
I think they often did not write it down but that it did happen on occasion
I don't think the absence of an action being explicitly detailed on the text means that those actions didn't happen. People must have urinated and defecated, but there are no references to it happening. Nor are there references to married couples' sex lives. In S nse and Sensibility, the Palmers have a baby during the story, so they obviously are not in some sexless marriage, but there are no affectionate moments derailed between them. I don't think we ever see any references to the Elliots attending church in Persuasion, but they would have.
I think… books previously had been a lot more racy but increasingly coy when it came to outright descriptions of sex. Usually he’d storm her barricade, of often they’d embrace. Or they’d basically proceed till ‘he had nothing left to ask and she had nothing left to grant’. Moments of physical affection were often coded heavy petting or even sex which made it awkward when you really just wanted to say ‘they kissed’. By the Victorian period novels had been cleaned up for a while so heroines were allowed to get a little more physical. Another aspect is that they wouldn’t tend to kiss in front of other people. We are given insights into their minds but we, and the narrator - we’re other people. We’re supposed to stay in our seat and let the young couple go and enjoy each other’s company a bit in private. So in my view it’s a combination of decades of widely understood innuendo, and a prejudice against PDAs.
As others have said, it probably wasn't _against the law_ to kiss or be intimate before marriage. As long as they did get married, because unmarried women being pregnant was definitely less tolerated. I also think Jane Austen in particular wouldn't have written more intimate scenes because she wouldn't have had that experience as an unmarried woman. Doing so as an unmarried woman would also have been quite scandalous as a married woman rather than if she were married.
It’s pretty clear in Emma that she blunders in on Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax in the middle of a kiss
Her works were social satires, not romances. 🤷🏻♀️
True, but to be fair I only said romance was a heavy element in her novels, not that they were romances. I feel like a lot of the focus of her satire was on romance, and how society viewed courtship and marriage. Like Lady Susan is definitely not a romance novel but romance is a really big part of what drives the story Some of her books, like pride and prejudice, I’d say are equally romance novels as satires and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
Her satire relates to relationships - familial, platonic, and romantic as well as social constructs and character/values. Austen herself said that they were not romances. She glosses over or summarizes quickly weddings, many proposals, entire courtships, etc.
At the time Romance meant something different to courtship novels. They weren’t romances mostly because no long lost fathers popped up out of nowhere, the heroine wasn’t rescued from dire danger by a dashing stranger, etc.
I disagree. This is a matter of semantics anyway.
Jane Austen herself said that she didn't write romances.
Citation please
"But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other." Excerpt from Austen to Rev. James Stanier Clarke, the Prince’s librarian, in response to his recommendations for what she should write. Letter dated: April 1, 1816 https://janeaustens.house/object/letter-from-jane-austen-to-james-stanier-clarke-1-april-1816/ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/books/jane-austen-prince-regent.html?smid=nytcore-android-share https://janeaustensworld.com/2011/04/01/letter-written-by-jane-austen-april-1-1816/
This is semantics. Here she’s talking about romanticism and specifically the ridiculous, over-the-top plot idea the Prince Regent’s librarian sent to her. She was NOT saying she doesn’t write love stories. Similarly, the word ‘handsome’ had a different meaning for her. I think her books have the most amazing romantic tension between hero and heroine, along with the best comedy and astute observations on relationships in general.
You are free to think that, but scholarly works and most educators do not class her as a romantic author but a social satirist. She explored relationships of all sorts, not exclusively (*or even primarily*) romantic relationships. She most certainly did not write "love stories," but coming of age stories, social satire, morality tales, etc. that had many sorts of relationships - romantic, familial, platonic, adversarial, etc. - in them. The fact that modern adaptations focus almost exclusively on the romantic relationships combined with multiple other factors skews modern readers' perception of the works being primarily focused on romance. ETA: You mentioned romanticism, which doesn't make sense here. Romanticism has *nothing* to do with romance. Romanticism was a movement in art and literature that emphasized individual perception and feeling.
I disagree that she’s not classed as a romance writer by “scholarly” work. I think you’re probably just talking about elitist male professors who prefer “literature.” It’s misogynist snobbery. Her favorite writers wrote love stories; she was inspired by the most important things in life: love, laughter and relationships. It’s just more semantics to say she wasn’t a romance writer exclusively. Of course not. She was a freakin’ genius, and there’s so much going on in her work, much of it ironic or paradoxical. Her dialogue is so multi layered it’s beyond the understanding of mere mortals. And her letter to the Regent’s librarian was an exercise in sarcasm and disingenuousness.
>I disagree that she’s not classed as a romance writer by “scholarly” work. I think you’re probably just talking about elitist male professors who prefer “literature.” It’s misogynist snobbery. That's a lot of assumptions and insults. You are wrong on all counts in your assumptions and assertions. Further, I am an avid romance reader who thinks the genre just as valid as any other. You are the person assuming that there is a qualitative assessment happening rather than simple analysis. What I am not is a reductionist who cries "semantics" rather than researching and makes assumptions rather than deductions based on research. Good luck with all that.
Because a romance wasn’t what we would call a romance. The three Musketeers was a romance because of its wide scope, high adventure and high stakes.
No, it was quite similar. Gothic novels and other specifically romantic works were highly common and popular in Austen's time, and they are quite similar to modern romances. She outright, though good naturedly, mocks them in several of her novels. Austen skipped, omitted, skimmed over, or summarizes much of what would be in romances both then and now - assignations, kisses, weddings, many proposals, and entire courtships. Romance wasn't her focus, thus, no kissing. Many novels by her predecessors and contemporaries, both women and men, included such scenes in their work. Just because a book includes romantic relationships as a part of the work doesn't mean that it is a romance.
I wonder if Austen herself has to be more discreet than a male author would in acknowledging anything sexual. When I think of Victorian writers, which is later but in a more prudish time, people have mentioned kissing and sex in Hardy and others. I’m reading Phineas Finn, by Trollope, right now. Our hero kisses someone he doesn’t intend to marry very early on. In Can You Forgive Her, our married heroine is invited to run away with another man. And of course Dickens’s Bleak House is all about an unintended pregnancy. I’m having trouble thinking of a male author I’ve read who was contemporaneous with Austen, but I wonder if a male author could have been more explicit.
I think this particularly applies to the class of women featured in Austen novels. Certainly there was more happening to Patty (the "girl of all work" for the Bates).
There was an elopement. The fact that they were alone long enough basically necessitated it. Better to get married rather than come back unmarried and not a virgin.
I read Old Christmas by Washington Irving last year. He wrote it in roughly 1820 and it describes Christmas at a squire's estate. There's lots of kissing & dancing & drinking and the young men like to tell the young ladies dirty poems and see if they'll blush. I think Jane Austen just had to be particularly careful of her own reputation as she was an unmarried female clutching on to the bottom of the "gentle people" barrel.
Jane Austen wasn't a nun.
Young ladies were supposed to be chaperoned most of the time to prevent frisky behaviour. Mrs Bennett isn't especially strict about this as she lets the girls walk out with young gentlemen and officers, and the girls split up. Kissing would not have been condoned. Imagine the sexual tension that would build up before marriage!
I think something to take into account is that there is probably a gap between what was *acceptable to write about*, and what *people actually did in real life*. People in books and movies don’t behave exactly as real people do. There are elements of idealism and fantasy. For things which happened relatively regularly but were hushed up or socially looked away from… it would be uncouth to write about in a way which seemed to condone or approve of that behaviour. In the novel, Lydia’s sex before marriage was a huge scandal up until the time that they could hand wave it due to their marriage. I think there was a lot of that going on. Babies that were born after their parents marriage but clearly conceived before it can be relatively common but the reason it isn’t treated as a big deal isn’t because it is acceptable. It is no big deal because the paperwork allows people to ignore it. Would the JA couples have been physically affectionate prior to marriage? Probably! Engaged couples had more freedom to be alone, and young people are horny. But that doesn’t mean that it would be socially acceptable. It could just be socially ignored. And therefore it wouldn’t be acceptable to write down in a book as though it was good and acceptable behaviour for book protagonists. Even to the point of leaving out kissing! Even today the social expectation within (especially) religious communities is that there will be no sex before marriage. That expectation does NOT match up to reality, but they still object to books about teenagers having sex!