Echoes of the picnic on Box Hill in the BBC production of  Jane Austen's Emma

SORRY EVERYONE - THIS IS IMGUR'S DOING, NOT ME

https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgur-access-in-the-United-Kingdom 

And the same ladies enjoying a moment on the Palladian Bridge

All in the landscape garden of Prior Park (NT) in Bath, with a branch of the Jane Austen Society present. Well worth a visit

Love the pictures David. As a fisheries trainee with Wessex Water all those years ago I have memories of visiting the Park after a ‘concerned someone’ contacted the department about the fish that were madly splashing around in the lakes in distress they thought. It turns out there was nothing untoward. The carp were spawning.

By coincidence I’m watching this series now on Netflix set around the same era, not in Bath but on the decadent streets of London. Not much nudity but the women remain the property of men and even those with money know it is not their own. A different take on Jane Austin’s genteel world but perhaps not so very much different under the fashions of that time. Are we today on another of those roads back to where women are second class humans in a Handmaids Tale sort of way? Trump's followers would see it that way perhaps. And others too.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jul/08/harlots-season-three-lesley-manville-liv-tyler 

I've always regarded Elizabeth Bennet as a mercenary minx rather than a romantic heroine after reading her comment on visiting Pemberley "to all of this, I could have been mistress". A contributor to Quora expands on this : Rather than live at home with her family, waiting for an uncertain and possibly dire future, she could by now be the wife of Darcy and the mistress of Pemberley. In 1813 when Pride and Prejudice was published, marriage was the only serious career option for a woman, and Austen herself comments explicitly on this when Charlotte Lucas explains her reasons for marrying the odious Mr Collins.

And it more or less boiled down to money and how to acquire it one way or another.