It’s 200 years since the death of Jane Austen, the author who created such wonderful characters as Elizabeth Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy, the Dashwood sisters, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse ... the list just goes on and on. So this week we thought we’d do something different by taking a look at what life was like for women at that time.

Two hundred years sounds like a very long time ago but it really isn’t. I well remember my grand-aunt Essie, who was born in 1885 and died in 1978. My mother’s mother was born in 1900, while my other three grandparents were all born in the second half of the 1800s, so there’s three centuries bridged in the blink of an eye.

What strikes me most about this era is how important it was to have excellent health. With no antibiotics and little by way of effective medicines, a cold could kill you. Catching a cold or fever was a frightening occurrence, especially if you were from the lower classes where you didn’t get paid if you were unable to work. And there was no such thing as sick pay.

The lot of most women was pretty dismal. If you were upper or middle class, making a good marriage was essential. If you had no fortune, being pretty really mattered. If you failed to secure a well-off husband, then you had to depend on the generosity of a father or brother for support, a scenario which is wonderfully described in Sense & Sensibility.

Even if you were in possession of a large fortune, as in the case of Georgina Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, you were prey for fortune hunters and, on marriage, your fortune passed into the ownership of your husband. As a woman, you had no right to sell land or houses, or even household furniture or jewellery.

In the event of there being only daughters in a family, their father’s entire estate could be entailed to male relations and on his death this would leave his wife and daughters without any income or even a roof over their heads. Again, this was commonplace up to relatively recently.

This is exactly the situation that faced Mrs Bennet and her five daughters in Pride & Prejudice, my favourite Jane Austen novel. “What shall become of us all,” is a line poor Mrs Bennet repeats over and over again as she frets about having five unmarried daughters all out in society and an estate entailed to the male line.

She is demented by their situation and all she can think of is getting at least one of her girls married well – a phrase I still hear spoken today. She will do anything to see this happen and who would blame her given that her husband hasn’t saved a penny to take care of his family after his death.

I hope you enjoy this look back to Jane Austen’s time. If you don’t know her novels, I envy the treat that awaits you. If you haven’t time to read them, I recommend the screen adaptations – especially the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. It’s pure perfection and available on Netflix.

Much and all as I love Jane Austen, I wouldn’t like to have been born in her time. However, in her own way, Austen is timeless, with more fans now than at any stage over the past 200 years. CL