SOURCE: Lane, Maggie. “Greed and Gender.” In Jane Austen and Food, pp. 77-100. London: The Hambledon Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Lane discusses the nineteenth-century notion that an appetite for food was associated with both greed and sexual desire and thus considered indelicate in females.

Jane Austen was not quite twelve years old when the Reverend John Trusler's book The Honours of the Table for the Use of Young People was published. In this work Trusler declares, with perfect seriousness, that to eat very much ‘is now deemed indelicate in a lady, for her character should be rather divine than sensual’.¹ One can imagine Mrs Austen's snort of impatience with that. Whether the Austens owned a copy of the book is not known, nor whether Jane ever read this particular contribution to the cult of female sensibility. What is certain is that, from a very early age, she...