So what did education look like at the time of Jane Austen? Girls like Elizabeth Bennett or Emma Woodhouse were educated at home by governesses, while men went off to school. This is why, according to dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin Darryl Jones, the sphere of influence and the geographical sphere in which women operated at this time was very often quite small.

When Jane Austen writes about three or four families in the country village, that’s because the world in which she herself would have moved was a very small domestic sphere, while her brothers were off in the church or navy.

“Education” may not be the most accurate description of what girls experienced at home with their governesses. The term “accomplishments” seems more fitting to describe the “education” women received during these times.

While a gentleman’s education would have been in the classics (Latin and Greek), the accomplishments in which girls were instructed didn’t encompass a classical or scientific education. Rather, accomplishments could mean, for example, some degree of proficiency in modern languages: French for example.

It also encompasses drawing and artwork and sewing and embroidery. Darryl Jones notes that “the whole function of this kind of education is not to improve the minds of young girls but to make them appropriate or luring wives – prospective wives”.

Novels

Despite the fact women didn’t get a formal education to a very high degree – of the kind we would recognise today – one place where they did have an opportunity to enlarge their understanding of the world was through reading novels.

“It’s important to remember that novels at this time were not considered to be high art …[because] novels were generally associated with, and read by, women at the time. So there was something sort of disreputable about novels,” says Darryl.

Country Living enquires as to whether even a woman displaying Mensa levels of intelligence would have been recognised and sent off to university in Jane Austen’s time, but Darryl explains that Oxford and Cambridge didn’t start admitting women until the 1860s and 1870s – and even then women were not permitted to take degrees. Darryl says Cambridge didn’t award degrees to women until as late as the 1940s.

Darryl says that for any of the daughters in a family like Pride and Prejudice’s Bennetts, taking paid work was not really acceptable.

Darryl explains: “The professions, as it were, were not open to women. So that would be the law, the clergy and, to an extent, the military as well, and these were the ways in which middle-class landed gentry men made their way in the world if they weren’t inheriting the property.

“Generally the eldest son inherited the property, like Mr Knightley in Emma. His youngest brother John Knightley is a lawyer, so he has to make his way in the world and he does that through the professions.”

For women, apart from becoming a governess, there really wasn’t very much. And really – being a governess was not considered acceptable for ladies of high social standing. In Emma, Jane Fairfax talks about going into the governess trade, which she describes as a trade in human flesh (which, according to Darryl Jones means “it’s either slavery or prostitution or some kind of combination of both of those things”).

Shop-keeping was an option for women during this time, as well as becoming a respectable gentleman-farmer’s wife, like Harriet Smith does in Emma.

Becoming a servant was, of course, an option for working-class girls of the time – as even to keep a small family going at the time required an army of servants. CL