] Is JA protectively ignoring the economic bases of the gentry lifestyle. She doesn't ignore it, as Auden so strikingly noted, in matters of marriage. There she is beautifully clear in all the books, and in fact the materialism of the class is the gridiron on which the marriage games are played.

While it's true that Jane Austen didn't write about the plight of the desperately poor, a central theme of her comedy is the plight of the poor but genteel women in Regency society.
'Large income' was not synonymous with high social standing. It was possible to be poor and genteel at the same time, and Jane Austen writes extensively about such families: the Bateses, Jane Fairfax, the Morlands, the Dashwoods, even the Bennets, to name just a few. Jane Austen was herself a poor but genteel woman, finding herself, after the death of her father, in a situation not unlike Elinor Dashwood's. This is the world Jane Austen knew, and like all good writers, she wrote about what she knew. It fell to George Orwell to write Down And Out in Paris and London; Jane Austen simply hadn't experienced these things. Instead she took what she did experience - the limited options of women, especially women without large dowries, in Regency society, and turn it into some pretty brilliant comedies.

As for the 'invisibility' of servants in Jane Austen's novels - I think this reflects the attitudes of the time, and we should be careful before passing judgment on Jane Austen for not focusing on servants. Contemporary values - mine included! - are egalitarian and stress the value of all people regardless of income, religion, country of origin, occupation, etc. In Regency society, however, people did not think this way. I suppose a servant who swept the parlor floor at Pemberley every morning would arouse no more notice from the Darcys than today we would regard a vacuum machine. That sounds very harsh to our modern sensibilities, but I think that's just the way it was.

I remember as a child looking though old family picture albums from the late 1800s and early 1900s at my grandparents' house in Sweden. The dates, names of the people in the pictures and the and occasion are carefully noted below the pictures - but where there are servants in the pictures, the servants' names are never mentioned! I remember one picture of people sitting in an open carriage on a picnic outing, and the horses' names, but not the driver's, names are recorded! Attitudes were very different back then.