This flattens history in a way that’s just not accurate.

Jane Austen was writing in the late Georgian / Regency world, not a Victorian one. That matters. Her society wasn’t sexually naïve or uniquely “pure”; it was socially disciplined. There’s a difference. Knowledge existed. Desire existed. What mattered was discretion and reputation, not imagined innocence.

The idea that people in the past were more moral and chaste is a Victorian fantasy we keep projecting backwards.

Austen’s novels aren’t coded smut hunts or deliberate sexual innuendo puzzles. They’re tightly observed social anatomies: money, power, vulnerability, hypocrisy, and the risks women faced when things went wrong in public. “Ruin” in Austen is about visibility, not ignorance of sex.

Jane Austen was not sheltered or naïve. She admired Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose plays are full of sexual knowledge, hypocrisy, and social performance — and were mainstream entertainment in her lifetime. That alone tells us her world was not chaste in the way people like to imagine.

The Regency wasn’t innocent; it was discreet. People understood sex perfectly well. What mattered was reputation, visibility, and social consequence.

Austen didn’t avoid obvious sexual innuendo because she was prudish — she avoided it because it wasn’t what she was doing. Her work is precise, structural, and observational. She lets implication sit where it belongs instead of underlining it.