Mrs Bennet was right.

On Friday, 14 November, Professor Guzmán González, from the English Department at the University of León, and Professor García Rubio, from this institution and the research group, delighted us with an entertaining talk about the English writer. Organised by the Bandini bookshop, run by Óscar Porral (on Avenida dá Peregrina, Bertamiráns), as part of its ‘Conversas Bandini’ series, and by the De Conflictu Legum group, the event was intended as a tribute to the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, which is being celebrated this year.

The professors unravelled various aspects of the author's life and work, as well as some of the legal institutions that appear most frequently in her novels. Professor Trindade Guzmán began by analysing her rich language, an English typical of the family she came from (‘a family between the lower nobility and the bourgeoisie with possibilities’), but extremely polished, highlighting Austen's meticulousness when writing and correcting her works. She ended her presentation by reading us several sentences that perfectly distilled the English irony so well captured by the writer when describing some of her characters (‘She was not a woman of many words, because, unlike many people, she adjusted the amount to the number of her ideas’), even reaching ‘fierce sarcasm’ in some passages of the letters that have been preserved.

For her part, Professor García Rubio took the beginning of chapter seven of Pride and Prejudice as an example of the complexity of legal institutions, particularly those related to inheritance, which are reflected in Jane's work: 'Almost all of Mr Bennet's property consisted of an estate that yielded an annual income of two thousand pounds. Unfortunately for his daughters, in the absence of a male heir, the estate was tied to a distant relative." At that time (we are talking about the late 18th century), it was very common for the inheritance of land, with everything on it, to be linked to males, usually the firstborn and, in their absence, to successive males, even from collateral lines, leaving women excluded from the real estate that conferred status and lineage. Therefore, in the absence of a son, Mr. Bennet's property would not pass to any of his five daughters, but to a distant nephew. Although these types of inheritance arrangements were varied and complex, and with all due respect, it could be said that Mr. Bennet was merely a lifetime usufructuary, unable to dispose of the land during his lifetime, either to sell it or to leave it as an inheritance, with Mr. Collins being the bare owner until his uncle's death. These issues led the professor of civil law to talk about the institution of entailed estates, which disappeared during the 19th century in Spanish law (and in comparative continental law, due to the influence of the ideals of the French Revolution), but which, in practice, even contra legem, continued to exist for some time.

In short, this ‘Conversation’, which was attended by a large audience, highlighted, from two original perspectives, the talent and literary and historical-legal value of a writer who is now fully recognised, encouraging above all the ‘young’ generations to delve into her work.