Sydney meeting
‘You will be an old maid! and that’s so dreadful!’: The single woman in Austen’s era
Dr Joanna Penglase

Marriage, as Charlotte Lucas knows, is ‘the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and…must be their pleasantest preservative from want’. But what if a woman didn’t marry, thus becoming – like Jane Austen herself – an ‘old maid’? This little-discussed topic – a significant undercurrent in Austen’s work – is given its due in this talk, drawing on the novels within their wider historical context.