Re: Of cabbages and kings....

Very well. At the risk of being hung, drawn and quartered, I can explain all my points in one go. Jane Austen is telling the stories. As a reader I read and enjoy her stories but view them with tongue firmly in cheek. ( Pride and Prejudice, as I have often said, is possibly my favourite book) I am a male in the twenty first century, Jane wrote in the early nineteenth. She was a gentle lady who lived a somewhat sheltered family life and some of her views on life are either questionable, or possibly deliberately mischevious. She also wrote satire mocking the middle class world around her. Her works leave much to the imagination as she never went into detail on many things. In short, I don't take her characters seriously because I don't believe that was her aim. The whole of middle class England, even higher, was a farce, from the monarchy downwards. It is no secret that Jane Austen had little time for the Prince Regent and his questionable morals and lifestyle.