One of the point we touched upon was how secular Austen's novels are. The Church of England seems to serve only as a means to give living and social status to some boring men with no inheritance (Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice or Mr Elton in Emma.
Another observation was that £ 30,000 (the value of Woodhouse property) at that time would be over two million in today's money, according to the inflation calculator from the Bank of England website.
And as far as Napoleonic wars being a taboo in Austen's time, I've taken this idea from some project film made by highschoolers about the relationship between Austen and their county. Yet, when you look into the two novels by Austen that I've read (Pride and Prejudice and Emma), you don't realy see them mentioned. When you look at Vanity Fair, which was published some thirty years later, you see that Napoleon and his wars are omnipresent mentioned very often, particularly in the part of the book set up to the time of Waterloo, and one of the characters even dies in that battle. Note that Austen's two brothers were in the navy, and one even saw action at Trafalgar.
Right, I now remember that you mentioned those things during our discussion. Maybe I owe you an apology, I really should get better at taking down notes, it's just that the talk sometimes gets too captivating to focus on writing important points down — which is a compliment to our little Club when you think about it.