Age
Lizzy says she’s almost 23 on the trip back from Hunsford (which says she was born pretty quickly after her parents married).
Family and Situation
Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet; Jane is the elder sister of Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine, and Lydia Bennet.
Jane lives with her family at Longbourn House in Hertfordshire. Through her father’s estate, Jane will get “one thousand pounds in the four percents, which will not be [hers] till after [her] mother’s decease,” making her prospects pretty meager assuming that all of the Bennet girls have the same prospects.
She and her sister Elizabeth are also quite close to her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner.
Appearance
Mrs. Bennet lauds Jane as the most attractive, at one point going even so far to say that “one does not often see anybody better looking.” She is also one of the Bennet girls about whose beauty “Mr. Bingley had heard much.”
Character
As the eldest and reputedly most beautiful of the Bennet girls, Jane has the most pressure on her to marry. Mrs. Bennet at one point says that “When she was only fifteen, there was a man at my brother Gardiner's in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away. But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.” Given that she’s still talking about it 7 years later, it may imply that the prospects have not been great since then. Perhaps this explains why Mrs. Bennet is so eager to get her stuck at Netherfield in the rain.
Jane is the sweetest of the Bennet girls and good-natured to a fault. Lizzy tells us repeatedly that Jane only ever sees the good in people and, as a result, has liked some truly stupid people over the years. Simultaneously, she is also eager to please her family and only too delighted that both she and her parents would set upon Bingley as the man she ought to marry.
Jane is also extremely close to the next-eldest sister Lizzy and many of Lizzy’s decisions which drive the plot forward are made based on (or in spite of) Jane’s advice. Jane is reluctant to believe in either Wickham or Darcy’s tales of woe and is about the last person convinced that Lydia and Wickham didn’t intend to marry. Her naïveté also allows other people to walk over her at times, as when Caroline Bingley proves to be a fake friend without genuine interest in her well-being.
