Regency series: #what happens when you turn 28 35💀
#what happens when you turn 28 35💀
Page 56 of The Visount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn:
"And you are so ancient at what, twenty years of age?"
Page 12: "It had been decided that the most logical time qould be when Edwina was just seventeen and Kate almost twenty-one. Mary would have liked to have waited until Edwina was eighteen, and a bit more mature, but that would have made Kate narly twenty-two, and heaven's but who would marry her then?
I want to clarify that Kate is 21 in the book, and Edwina is 17. So they are both much younger than their tv personas. Edwina is still, technically, a child in the book.
From Jane Austen at Home, by Lucy Worsley on page 84:
"The average age for women to marry in the 1790s was twenty-four. But it was lower in the gentry circles to which the Austens were admitted, even if they did not quite belong. Here, expectations of marriage would have started from the age of seventeen. Indeed, in Pride and Prejudice Jane Bennet gets her first suiter at fifteen, and seventeen was the age at which Jane's heroine Catherine Morland both meets and accepts the proposal of her future husband in Northanger Abbey.
On page 121, Lucy Worsley writes: "What astonishes - but what also helps Lizzy Bennet's believability - is the thought that Jane wrote her first draft when she was exactly the same age as her heroine, 'not one and twenty'."
I love making posts like these. Where I can show you guys book quotes coupled with more historical, non-fiction facts. I understand why Netflix "aged up" Edwina and Kate. A 17 year old teenage girl on the cusp of getting married and also being idealized by the entire London ton as the "diamond of the first water" is a bit iffy, especially to audiences today. Although in the 18th century, it was very commonplace.
From The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain (borrowed from my library) by Ian Mortimer on page 60:
"So what counts as 'old age' in Regency Britain?...In the early nineteenth centry, when life expectancy at birth is about forty, the modal of death is over seventy...Thus the biblical 'three score years and ten' is quite acheivable, and it is mainly that figure which denotes 'old age'..."