FROM Bridgerton to Gossip Girl to Prince Harry’s autobiography, nothing gets the popular imagination going better than high net-worth coitus.
But did you know that this silver spoon steaminess only became commonplace in the 19th century, when Regency-era Britain realised rough sex between rude mechanicals was no longer selling? And turned to a certain young writer named Jane Austen.
While there are no sex scenes in Austen’s novels, because she was a woman, scholars have argued strongly that her works are ruled by sexual tension within the upper classes. It is also clear Mr Knightley was laying pipe behind the scenes.
The author’s recently uncovered unpublished foreword to Pride and Prejudice reads: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that whether frenzied rutting be implicit or explicit, it must be done in a big fancy room for maximum effect.
“The literary canon is dominated by good hard seeings-to, from Adam and Eve to Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. Yet we are missing a trick: these shaggers are not wealthy in a way that the reader should be unable to identify with in the smallest degree.
“In fact, such is the power of the upper classes at it, the author should feel free to spend much of the narrative focused on not the characters’ relationships but minutiae like the acreage of their estates. The reader will understand this is a metaphor for penile girth.
“My critics must remember, however, that this is a genre of fantasy. In the real world, who could ever imagine these socially inept, hideously overbred near-cousins being anything other than dry and functional betwixt the sheets?
“I hope readers of the future acknowledge my works for that which they truly are: a chance to watch an actress be ripped out of a bodice so tight her mammoth honkers are propelled up to her chin. It wouldn’t be the same in rags.”
And so Jane Austen affirmed her legacy for hundreds of hours of luxuriant, steamy sexual scenes that the nation is forced to watch while seated next to their mums.
Next week: to 859, when Viking raiders invaded Britain to ruthlessly impose their concept of hygge.
