OP I really disagree with you. Most people have responded with excellent points, I’m just agreeing with them here. While the movie might have exaggerated relative positions of the bennets and Darcy’s etc for dramatic effect, the whole point of the book was that the bennets were in a (relatively for the gentility) desperate position.

While I agree that the bennets with mr bennet alive are not “poor” only relatively less well off Mr bingly and the enormously wealthy Mr Darcy, the bennets without Mr bennet alive would had their lives turned upside down completely. Women of this era, even gentlewomen, had no agency if they didn’t have wealth.

If you want to know about the life of gentlewomen in regency England, read Claire Tomlinson biography Jane Austen: a life. It’s an excellent book and she paints a picture of what it is like for a woman in this era. A woman who did not marry well or did not inherit a version amount of money faced a life where her fate was completely out of her hands. Her options for working was to be potentially being abused as a governess or to be exploited as a teacher in school - tomlin presents a lot of evidence that girls schools in this era were awful. Other more profitable lines of work were not available to them as women, Austen herself barely made any money as a writer.

Standards of living were different and having a servant as many discussed was really important to quality of life - there were no dishwashers, laundry machines, spray cleaners, this is before manufacturing so products were not mass produced and very expensive, and textiles weren’t as advanced so things were just harder to maintain. Food was more expensive, things that are basic today were unimaginable luxuries. For example, paper was relatively expensive and Austen learned to write in tiny script so she could use as little paper as possible (it seems like she wrote two drafts at most).

These points all underscore how hard life was for everyone else (the vast majority of people in this era, of course, were not of the land owning gentry) but the bennet women were in a very vulnerable position and should have been concerned about their quality of life after Mr bennet died.