WHY THERE'S NO SEX IN JANE AUSTEN'S FICTION

The question of why there is no sex in Jane Austen's fiction has long fascinated many of her readers. The question matters, apart from fact that things having to do with sex usually matter, because its absence in Austen's novels has been held against them, has been seen as limiting their greatness. Instead, I offer a defense of that absence, a defense cast in form of tradition and individual talent. I begin by sketching what British novels were like when Austen started writing, what narrative conventions had developed by end of eighteenth century. There is a lot of attempted (and achieved) rape in eighteenth-century British fiction. The plots of novels are littered with endangered virgins.1 As Nancy K. Miller puts it in her study of some eighteenth-century British and French novels, the heroine's text is text of an ideology that codes femininity in paradigms of sexual vulnerability.2 This pattern certainly speaks to us of what I would call depressingly patriarchal relations between sexes in eighteenth-century England. Ruth Perry has discussed in fascinating detail how educational training of and social expectations for women led to lives of enforced leisure filled, and justified, by sexual and romantic fantasies.3 And Mary Poovey's analysis of eighteenth-century conduct books underlines extent to which social concern with propriety was based on pervasive