Well, that's an issue with the characters who end up paired off, but many don't. Right, but I'm suggesting that there would have been a lot more unmarried women in early C19th Britain than one might think from Austen's books (e.g. governesses, teachers, nurses). Plus, the romance format means that unmarriagable women are often portrayed as unfortunate, in a way that compounds the difficulty in writing happy stories about those characters. As such, the cause of the difficulty in writing upbeat Austen femslash may lie less in the historical era and location than in the nature of the source canon.

I'm reminded of a quote by Sarah Waters that I saw on The Guardian: "We underestimate the amazing variety of people's lives in the past, their ingenuity and resilience in dealing with the society they had to live in."