It is a truth universally acknowledged that a hack in search of a headline cannot resist conjoining Jane Austen’s name with the word “lesbian”. And so it proved this week when TV historian Lucy Worsley’s no-shit-Sherlock assertion that the Pride and Prejudice author never had sex with a man, then morphed into news stories that she had, instead, had sex with women.

It is no wonder that Claire Tomalin, Worsley’s fellow biographer of England’s Jane, laughed and called the claim “absolute bollocks” and a “tired old nag” when I asked what she thought, for it is just the latest obsession with Austen’s sex life. This time, it springs from a passage in Worsley’s new book, Jane Austen At Home: A Biography, in which she argues that there was a greater chance that the author had sex with a woman than a man.

But does that mean Worsley believes she had sex with women (or “lesbian sex”, as it has been breathlessly reported by national newspapers)? Well, no. Worsley’s point about Austen’s virginal status, made at the Hay festival on Saturday, was a tongue-in-cheek rhetorical point to emphasise that, for 18th-century middle-class “spinsters” like Austen, the sexual freedom enjoyed by single women at either end of the social scale – be they aristocrats or paupers – were off limits.

You only have to read Austen novels to know this. From unwed Bennet sister Lydia running off with wicked Mr Wickham in Pride and Prejudice to Willoughby’s seduction of Colonel Brandon’s 15-year-old ward in Sense and Sensibility, it is clear that sex outside marriage meant ruination for the middle-class woman. Adding the fact that Georgian contraception was as reliable as the rhythm method and chaperones kept single women tightly superintended, any opportunity for Austen to have sex would have been as undesirable as it was unlikely.

Worsley acknowledges this in her book. “Did Jane ever have lesbian sex?” she asks in a much-misquoted passage. “Here the stakes would have been much lower. Yes, it was frowned on by society. But this was an age where women very often shared beds, and Jane herself frequently records sleeping with a female friend.” And, she admits, at a time when many did not believe sex between women was possible, the “door of possibility may remain ajar”. But read on, because that particular door was only open “by the very tiniest crack, and only in the absence of evidence either way”.

Of course we have heard this before, hence Tomalin’s calling it “absolute bollocks”. The most notorious claim about Austen’s sexuality came in 1995, when Terry Castle, professor of English at Stanford University in California, published an essay called Was Jane Austen Gay? in the London Review of Books. She not only argued that the novelist was a lesbian – but that she was at it with her sister, Cassandra.

In a review of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, Castle wrote: “The conventions of 19th-century female sociability and body intimacy may have provided the necessary screen behind which both women acted out unconscious narcissistic or homoerotic imperatives.”

May have, could have, would have. It amounts to the same thing: without a shred of evidence about what Austen got up to between the sheets (and the conservative wing of the Janeites are equally vehement that she never had an impure thought), it is all pure speculation.

Social historian Amanda Vickery, who has made several documentaries about the writer, nails the issue behind this obsession: it says more about us than her. “The modern idea of a lesbian woman is anachronistic,” she says. “There was no understanding of the terms homosexual and lesbian that would mirror contemporary understandings.”

Even when Georgian women were gay, the phallocentric understanding of sexual intimacy meant sex between them was inconceivable. She quotes Lord Meadowbank at an 1811 trial in which two schoolmistresses were cleared of homosexuality because “the crime here alleged has no existence”. “Their private parts were not so framed as to penetrate each other, and without penetration the venereal orgasm could not possibly follow,” thundered his lordship.

In an age where sex is the standard currency with which to sell everything from celebrity careers to craft beer, attempts to sex up Austen are inevitable. But is there more to our interest than that? Austen scholar Bharat Tandon of the University of East Anglia thinks so: look to the text, he says, and the complexity of Austen’s fictional female relationships, like Emma Woodhouse’s obsession with beautiful Harriet Smith in Emma. “It’s a question of how you interpret those friendships. It is hard to unpick those moments where Emma’s interest in Harriet is because she is something to accessorise from those moments where it is somehow erotically proprietorial,” says Tandon, who edited the Harvard edition of the novel.

But none of that means Tandon believes Austen was projecting Sapphic urges. We simply do not know. We are unlikely ever to know. And it does not matter. For what this issue reveals more than anything, aside from our solipsistic readings of classic literature, is the genius of Austen and her ability to portray the ambivalence and complexity of human relationships, which is why she is read with a passion 200 years after her death.