favorite with most readers, concerning which Miss Austen said, "I am
going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,"--the
history of the blunders of a bright, kind-hearted, and really clever
girl, who contrives as much discomfort for her friends as stupidity or
ill-nature could devise.

Numberless as are the novelist's characters, no two clergymen, no two
British matrons, no two fussy spinsters, no two men of fashion, no two
heavy fathers, no two smart young ladies, no two heroines, are alike.
And this variety results from the absolute fidelity of each character to
the law of its own development, each one growing from within and not
being simply described from without. Nor are the circumstances which she
permits herself to use less genuine than her people. What surrounds them
is what one must expect; what happens to them is seen to be inevitable.

The low and quiet key in which her "situations" are pitched produces one
artistic gain which countervails its own loss of immediate intensity:
the least touch of color shows strongly against that subdued background.
A very slight catastrophe among those orderly scenes of peaceful life
has more effect than the noisier incidents and contrived convulsions of
more melodramatic novels. Thus, in 'Mansfield Park' the result of
private theatricals, including many rehearsals of stage love-making,
among a group of young people who show no very strong principles or
firmness of character, appears in a couple of elopements which break up
a family, occasion a pitiable scandal, and spoil the career of an able,
generous, and highly promising young man. To most novelists an incident
of this sort would seem too ineffective: in her hands it strikes us as
what in fact it is--a tragic misfortune and the ruin of two lives.

In a word, it is life which Miss Austen sees with unerring vision and