Leta Sundet

An obvious exception to this rule is Sense and Sensibility with its climax in Marianne's illness and near death, but even there the avoidability of the event is emphasized-as if this disaster were an interpolation from one of the romances upon which Marianne endeavors to model her life. Harriet Smith is accosted by some demanding gypsy children; Jane Fairfax (it is reported) nearly fell out of a boat; the Woodhouses and Knightleys almost get snowed in once. Austen regularly sets up tableaux in which we watch the reactions of a group of characters to slight disturbance or upheaval, an argument, a minor inconvenience-and watch them reveal their strength of character by those reactions. Austen's narrative technique mimics the nature of reality: she explores the way ordinary troubles, the miniature crises of which our days are made, expose a person's quality and serve as a kind of dress rehearsal for a true crisis.

With her claim in the opening sentence that she is "impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest" (533), the narrator explicitly asserts her control over the cast of characters who have, through her skillful rendering, achieved lives of their own; her readers thus feel little hesitation in critiquing her final narrative choices as arbitrary, inconsistent-even absurd. [...]the narrator, who spends the last chapter rigorously investigating the psychology of her characters, good and bad alike, shows very little interest in Maria the adulteress. In the preceding chapter, Austen has required us to feel all Maria's eager anticipation of Henry's visit, her "feverish" "delight" and "agitation" (225) as she witnesses his meeting with her father, and her devastation, the "agony of her mind" (226), when Crawford declares his intention of drifting off to Bath for the foreseeable future. [...]Austen's narrative interest in and care for this character grow in proportion to her suffering, as our extended forays into her mind reveal; Maria is emerging as a real human being in her grief-a character deserving of our interest and attention.