Obiter is concerned at the choice of author Jane Austen for the token woman decorating the ‘B’ side of our banknotes.

Obiter is concerned at the choice of author Jane Austen for the token woman decorating the ‘B’ side of our banknotes.

What’s wrong with that? Surely the intricacies of estates, settlements, trusts and wills - grist to her novels - provide a compelling record of private client work at the start of the 19th century?

Not such good news for lawyers though if the public, having noticed the author on a crisp new tenner, go home and actually pick up some Austen.

Take Emma. ‘Mr John Knightley’s being a lawyer is very inconvenient,’ Knightley’s own father-in-law Mr Woodhouse notes, while Emma herself finds Knightley’s reserve unpleasing, and he can seem a bit grumpy. Also in Emma, the heroine discounts ‘pert young lawyer’ William Coxe as a match for her friend Harriet.

In Pride and Prejudice, counting against the Bennet girls is the fact their uncle is a lawyer – one of their ‘low connections’. The scheming Mrs Clay in Persuasion is the daughter of a lawyer. Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, has a legal career considered for him, but instead follows his heart to the church and a happy ending.

Certainly in print Austen preferred clergy. A little light research reveals that the Austens had every reason to thank her father’s lawyer uncle for his generosity. So where did it all go wrong with her and the lawyers?

It is Obiter’s speculation that a brief lawyer ‘suitor’, Thomas Lefroy (later chief justice of Ireland, retiring at the age of 90), could have had a formative effect. The evidence is thin, but reading between the lines of destroyed letters, Lefroy rather led her on during a four-week break from his legal studies, failing to propose at the end of his mini-sabbatical. He may even have been on the verge of engagement to his college mate’s sister.

So, as it turns out, arguably a self-inflicted wound for the legal profession – and one with lasting fiction-based consequences for the reputation of lawyers everywhere. Obiter hopes law students will behave themselves over the summer break.