You will be an old maid! and that’s so dreadful!

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. Dr Joanna Penglase is an editor, literature tutor, and historian. She is a longstanding member of JASA and contributor to its conferences and journals. She was the editor of JASA’s Sensibilities until the end of 2025, and is the author of Orphans of the Living: Growing up in ‘care’ in twentieth-century Australia.