Jane Austen quote

"What a pleasant life may be had in this world by a handsome, sensible old lady of good fortune blessed with a sound constitution and a firm will."

But it's apparently *not* from Jane Austen!

The scriptwriter Malcolm Bradbury seems to have devised it, and while it sounds like something JA would've written - even Mr. Mybug said so! [tongue in cheek] - to the best of my searching, nobody's been able to locate it as a true Jane Austen quote.

It's a great line, no doubt, but it's definitely not from Austen! That's what's so funny about Mybug, of course -- we get to laugh at him (again!) for being so pompous and SO wrong.

It's somewhat a geriatric paraphrase of Emma Woodhouse's statement about an unmarried woman with money is not to be pitied and ridiculed like the impoverished spinster Miss Bates.

"...a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else."