Was thinking about Pride and Prejudice again, as I am wont to do often, and I realized: Caroline Bingley is an eighteen-year-old orphan. Like. The Bingleys' parents are fucking DEAD. That's sort of the whole underlying point.

(And we know that Caroline is basically a kid because Charles is her older brother, and he's, like, what, 21? He's one of the only men in the Austen corpus besides Mr. Collins who marries a woman his own age.)

So, like, either her parents died recently, in which case she's probably still grieving, or they died when she was a child, in which case their deaths are a foundational trauma, or they died when she was too young to remember them, in which case she was essentially raised by the Georgian equivalent to a trust fund. Jesus Christ.