] It certainly would loom large in the mind of Caroline Bingley. I would be eager to settle down when she wanted to rejoin her friends in London.

I don't think that Caroline Bingley exopresses an awful lot of interest in "the season". Bingley's Ball is the end of November, when the MP's were sitting, and the return to London is around Christmas time..just when parliament tended to "break" and all the MP's go back and report to their constituents. Darcy leaves London sometime after Christmas, and spends Easter (March or April) in Kent. We don't know what the Bingleys are doing at this point, except that they have been ignoring Jane. So we have a situation where the Bingleys are in London for January and February, but no particular mention of "the season" or of any particular goings-on.

So we are left with a question- did JA intend her readers to assume that Caroline wsa involved in "the season"? Since the phrase itself doesn't seem to appear in any of her novels at all, its really hard to know what JA thought of the season, or even if she would recognise the phrase.