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Notes -
Yeah Austen absolutely loved annoying characters like this, perhaps most famously Miss Bates.
Aside: Barbara Pym wrote whole novels about characters like this in the mid-20th century. In Jane and Prudence she actually names one of the protagonists Prudence Bates, who very early on notes that she has spent her life fearing that people will think of Austen's Miss Bates when they meet her.
This has nothing to do with the main post, except to say that Pym's oeuvre consisted in large part of skewering the behavior OP observes. It's great entertainment, and often contains a wistful note of more perceptive characters lamenting that they are stuck in these situations.
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