Jane Austen was a more knowing person, by an order of magnitude -- a more comprehensive mind and soul, with a higher clifftop view -- than most of those that use her name or make her a character in their films and productions.* In particular, as the late Allan Bloom says in his brilliant book, Love And Friendship, Ms Austen knew a great deal about sexual attraction.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that she regretted it, and yet knew it had to be there as the glue of society. There are two reasons for the regret. In the first place, the sexual desire of men has quite literally cost millions of women their lives, never mind the existential or emotional cost. What for men is pleasure, or at worst, disappointment, can for women result in a harrowing tightrope of life or death, with panic, fear, and torturous pain braiding in novel combinations until the final judgement of live or die can be known. (For a contemporary restatement of the horror, try for instance the film Philomena.) Jane Austen watched as her friends, relatives, neighbours and acquaintances suffered through very frequent pregnancies, sometimes unto death. But the men kept going, kept seeking their pleasure. What sort of God sanctions this? What sort of man is willing, for the sake of the urgency of his need, to put his beloved through this? What sort of God puts that sort of need in a man? How can a woman look upon all this with complacent love of both? I don't think that Jane Austen did.**

Yet Jane (may I call you Jane?) felt her own urgent need, and that must have conditioned her judgement of the men and their apparent callousness. It is still a misconception of our time (yes: our time has misconceptions -- fancy that!) that women don't experience sexual desire as a physical burr, a tongue-chewing need. Experience differs, of course, but for some this is simply not true. Women, if neglected long enough, can experience privation much as a man would -- I will not say 'just as a man', since I am not a man -- which means the physical sense of compulsion as well as the emotional ache that says something is missing. And the greater the deprivation, the greater the agony. Nature is quite a bully in her own way. I have no doubt that Jane Austen lived long enough to feel Nature round her neck, to say nothing of her other parts, night and day.

But when Nature -- god bless her -- isn't threatening to break your knees unless you play strip poker with your last penny, she is trying to break you in other ways. There is the undeniable fact that a man and woman, if they are heterosexual as Jane was, can achieve an emotional intimacy and an open door to each other's souls as no other human connection can. (Homosexuals, of course, have their own like connection, but Jane was not, as we all know, homosexual.) I can only imagine the pain she must have felt as each friend formed an attachment, formalized an engagement, and then celebrated a marriage. The birth of the child of the marriage -- such pain and risk, before the mercies of modern hygiene and medical knowledge -- would have confirmed to her that intimacies had been shared, of which she would never have the savour. Even single people that have had the experience -- but only then, only in the past -- feel a bitter sense of being shut out from rewarding passion. Imagine how it would feel to live as a nun without choosing to be one, never to enjoy the reward of passion at all. All she would have had are the glimpses and the intimations. Jane would have been a Regency Tantalus, reaching for fruit the taste of which she didn't even know, and it would always draw away from her. And yet she, of all women and all souls, was especially well suited to intimate connection, and had a true appreciation of the virtues of men. If that isn't tragedy, I don't know what is. It is one thing to have loved and lost. It is another depth of torment altogether, never to have loved at all. I don't repeat this, obviously, to be original. I repeat it because it's true, and not many Westerners these days really know it.

The writer and critic James Bowman convincingly makes the point that Jane Austen must have known the basic truth about sex. He is right. People in the past were not unworldly, merely because they lived in a less permissive, more religious, and in some ways more refined age than our own. It is our childishness and naivety that allows us to imagine that this was so. But it's not even that she would have seen nature up close, and the mating animals of her largely rural world. It's that all of us, when we are called to the sexual life by Nature, do so mainly through our untutored imaginations. We do not need manuals, blue films, scientific explanation, and A to Z dirty magazines. We have a very little knowledge, some guesses and some hearsay, and some wrong ideas. The rest is our desire, which knows very well what its business is and what it is aiming for. This is why we managed to reproduce through thousands, indeed millions of years, before anatomy was described and before the written word was even thought of. Jane Austen knew what sex was without doing it because we all know what sex is without doing it. The greatest loss for her -- or perhaps it was a blessing, though her pain at coming close to marriage and then dropping it suddenly, in tears, suggests otherwise -- is that her imagining could never tell her just how fabulous it might have been.

* See for instance the astute critique in this review by James Bowman of the film, Becoming Jane.

** And: one final, less abstract question: why could not the men have withdrawn at the crucial moment? It may have denied them the final gratification, but what is that against a woman's well-being and indeed her very existence? How can men be so entirely self-regarding? It is a valid question. And yes, despite what people with offices, medical attire, and agendas will tell you, withdrawal is a genuine form of contraception, especially in the absence of anything better.