Jane Austen ‘frequently slept with a female friend’ and may have had lesbian sex

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Jane Austen did not have heterosexual sex and may well have had lesbian sex, a historian has revealed.

The author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility never married, and according to biographer Lucy Worsley, the only sex she would have had was with a woman.

Writing in her new book Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, Worsley says that ā€œpeople often long to know if the eternal spinster Jane Austen ever had sex with a man.

New ten pound banknote, featuring Jane Austen

ā€œThe answer,ā€ she concludes, ā€œis almost certainly not.ā€

The historian explains that this came down to class, as Austen occupied a ā€œtricky position in society.ā€

She said that ā€œfor a female member of the gentry, or pseudo-gentry, a pregnancy outside marriage would have been world shattering.ā€

Austen received her sole marriage proposal in 1802, from long-time family friend Harris Bigg-Wither, which she accepted – before changing her mind the next day.

12 years later, she wrote to her niece Fanny Knight with the advice that ā€œanything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection”.

Austen, who will appear on the new Ā£10 note, to be released in September, took her own advice to heart, but that didnā€™t necessarily mean she never had sex.

For Worsley writes that when it came to lesbian sex, ā€œthe stakes would have been much lower.

ā€œYes, it was frowned on by society.

ā€œBut this was an age where women very often shared beds, and Jane herself frequently records sleeping with a female friend.ā€

The historian adds that ā€œpeople were much less worried about lesbian sex in general.

ā€œIt wasn’t pursued in the law courts, or policed against by the matrons of polite society.

ā€œThis was,ā€ she adds hilariously, ā€œnot least because many of them didn’t quite believe that it was even possible.

ā€œSo that door of possibility may remain ajar.ā€

And to those readers who may think Austen too ā€œprissyā€ or repressed to engage in lesbian sex, Worsley has a few words of warning not to leap to conclusions.

Austen ā€œknew more than many people realise about what was considered at the time to be deviant sex,ā€ she writes.

While her works ā€œoften exist in readers’ imaginations in a strait-laced Victorian setting,ā€ in reality, Worsley says, ā€œJane was a writer of the late Georgian period, a much bawdier age.ā€