Whilst your question is of the most peculiar nature, my fancy is to assist you in your wager -it is most diverting, though I wonder whether a lady should be seen to be gambling in alehouses. Alas, I cannot think offhand of any direct mention of spiders, by metaphor or otherwise in any of my works. Upon checking with a useful tool pemberley's searcher my suspicions are confirmed. The closest to such a reference is a single mention of cobwebs in Northanger Abbey (scarcely surprising considering its gothic references):

best wishes

Jane Austen

But Wollstonecraft's posthumous reputation had been scandalised by the frank-ish memoirs of her widower Godwin, and she attacked the segments of society my own family represented, so I couldn’t simply follow her programme. Again, there is a modern tradition of romantic sentimental writing about the idea of ‘being a woman’, sometimes homoerotic in tone, which my stoutly Enlightenment-style perspective doesn’t easily accommodate—all my sardonic remarks about queer creatures with fat necks, bad breath or exposed bosoms who thronged the assembly rooms I frequented, for example, are dry-eyed and disenchanted in the extreme.

But in my way I was alert to patronage by males and a sense of female social disadvantages. In Northanger Abbey the heroine Catherine Morland is patronised by Henry Tilney till ‘ashamed of her ignorance’, which I explained was a misplaced shame as it enabled Cath to ‘minister to the vanity of others’—especially male others, doubtless. And Catherine has social clout and cachet only as the imaginary heiress of General Tilneys imaginings. The disinherited Dashwood females of Sense and Sensibility suffer affronts and humiliation as a result, the sisters of the Bath fragment The Watsons have sharp and anxious faces, think endlessly of marital possibilities which will be their only chance of escape from penury and patronage (and we watch them being patronised), the impoverished Bennet family of Pride and Prejudice suffer simply from being a female brood—a son would save the Longbourn estate from passing into the hands of the egregious Collins, and Elizabeth Bennet’s independence of spirit in the face of social pressures is admired and recommended.

In Mansfield Park it’s assumed that the rich and careless Henry Crawford, who toys with female affections, can simply have the ostensibly humble Fanny Price for the asking, and her pointed dislike and curt note to his sister implying this cut no ice—indeed, even the well-intentioned folk about Fanny refuse to believe she will not instantly succumb to a rich man who wishes to ‘have his way’. Emma’s social exposure in the next novel, partly as a young female without the male power to intimidate leaves her open to the malice of Mrs Elton--her femininity gives her assured gentility a quite different social idiom from that of her rich and robust neighbour Knightley, and the penury and social exposure of the female Bateses of Highbury and their poor but talented female relative Jane Fairfax, threatened with what I saw as the horror of governessing, imply a world made particularly tough for females, or at least females of a certain stamp or social position.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

I am Jane Austen, but as a sort of emanation of the spirit of the novels, and as you have already consulted a Regency Historian and have been heroically assiduous on your own account, it may well be that your main task is actually to reflect on the implications of what you already know, or about what can/ cannot be known about this topic! (For example, no doubt weddings differed hugely according to the social levels of the participants.) You may wish to read what Deirdre le Faye has to say about the (non-) availability of foodstuffs, the difficulties of keeping things safe, never mind fresh, in her Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels (pp.118, 121, especially), even for the most affluent members of society, which might limit possibilities even at wedding-feasts.

According to my biographer Claire Tomalin (reviewed here), whom I read with approval, weddings did not in my time call for large gatherings of relatives (p.80). Notable accounts, e.g. in the biographies of me by David Nokes and Claire Tomalin herself, instructively pinpoint the apparently rather sad wedding of my niece Anna Austen and Ben Lefroy given by Anna’s much younger half-sister Caroline. Both Anna and Caroline were the daughters of James Austen, my eldest brother. Anna was a flighty, intelligent, captious girl, close to me partly as the ‘abused’ (or at least misprized) stepdaughter of James’s strong-minded and perhaps bullying second wife Mary, and Anna might have been in semi-disgrace at the point of marriage in our village church at Steventon, and hence more low-key and with less of a splash being made than might be expected. Even her ‘granny’--my mother, Cassandra senior, was not present at the wedding, despite her persistent invalidism; weddings can hardly have been quite so unmarked by a sense of occasion. (The account is reproduced in Claire Tomalin’s biography, pp.246-7, and this reminds me that for a subdued affair, there seem to have been a reasonable choice of ‘nice things to eat’, and something of a sense of occasion, which may interest you a good deal:

You will like to see the whole account, no doubt—though it is strictly outside my literary ambit: ‘inside’ the novels themselves, one account of a wedding is particularly noteworthy—that in Emma, of Emma and Knightley, as viewed from the pernickety and particularly interesting perspective of Mrs Elton: she is so very deprecatory as she is jealous of Emma, sore on account of her declining influence at the court of Donwell, but she also brings arriviste assumptions as to what weddings should be ‘like’: but Knightley and Emma are an ‘old money’ alliance, and their idea of marriage precludes the conspicuous display (a Veblen-type phrase? I read him too!), which Mrs Elton thinks appropriate. To her, the marriage is a statement of one’s position and an opportunity to excite envy. Nothing could be further from the aims of Woodhouses and Knightleys; the latter family seems to have had a whole abbey to themselves since c. 1540 (even the socially elevated Woodhouses land is merely ‘a sort of notch in the Donwell estate’, despite the Woodhouses being by far the most genteel ‘other’ family in the Highbury area).

So the good taste of their sartorially ‘understated’ wedding also makes a political point which may be related to the reproof to Emma at Box Hill about the particular need to eradicate an alienating arrogance which the facts of one’s social position might too easily instil. Emma has earlier mused upon the perfect gentility of the Knightley’s and their ancient estate—the very awesomeness of the position precludes the finery, pretension and social display Mrs Elton thinks apposite. And this is why, perhaps, the wedding ceremony as reported by her really is a key to what this novel of mine is ‘about’.

There may also be relevant details for your talk in other works like Maggie Lane on Jane Austen and Food (Hambledon, 1995). Closer to the novels is the detail about meals and social occasions both in the lavishly illustrated The Making of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Sue Birtwhistle and Susie Conklin, which accompanied the 1995 film; you will certainly find things to add from that, I should imagine.

With best wishes,

Jane Austen.

Emma has structural centrality apart from her formal status as heroine. The events of the novel are focussed through Emma; things appear to be as they are perceived by Emma, so her mistakes or failures to read reality as it presents itself are of central significance in the novel. Of course we are also supposed, like her old friend Mr Knightley, to feel a special solicitude about her, her concerns, her feelings, and share her interest in ‘narrative’ as she attempts ot manipulate events, almost always with unhappy results. Indeed, I was on record as perceiving Emma as heroine, though, revealingly perhaps, as a heroine ‘whom no-one but myself would much like’. This seems to predict that the reader will not like Emma while at the same time I obviously assumed that this would not threaten the status or the enjoyment of the work. I liked the idea of her beauty, charm, intelligence and solicitude about her father, and shared an interest in ‘how narratives would develop’. Emma is in her way, ‘like’ a novelist, with the inevitable theories about people, interest in gossip, judgmentalism and bias.

However, I also said somewhere else in my letters that ‘pictures of perfection...make me sick and wicked’. I wanted to explore the strange mixture of loveableness and irritatingness people usually turn out to be ‘composed’ of. Emma is also an antithesis to the heroine of my previous novel, Mansfield Park, the timid, shrinking, unconfident, lower-ordersy, fairly un-interventionistic Fanny Price, with some consequent advantages. Emma was a kind of test case: already good enough to be interesting, but in need of some improvements and a little sentimental education. She is also very young, something readers don’t always remember: there is much to excuse her conduct.

‘Other heroines from the same period’sounds tough if you mean the heroines of other contemporary novels, as those are, however unjustly, now read mainly by scholars, and not too many of those. There was, for exmple one by Charlotte Lennox I read, and re-read, called The Female Quixote, which suggests some capacity for delusion on a heroine’s part. I was also influenced by Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine (1813) and Mary Brunton’s Discipline, about a rich, spoilt girl who gets her comeuppance.

So sorry about the slight delay. Still recovering from the Christmas pud, etc. (Oh the etc.!)

With best wishes,

Jane Austen