But Fanny's upright character guides her through her own relationships with dignity--although sometimes with a chilling disdainfulness--and leads to her triumph at the close of the novel. While one may not like the rather priggish heroine, one does develop a sympathetic understanding of Fanny's thoughts and emotions and learn to value her at least as highly as the more attractive but less honest members of the Bertram family and its circle. Emma

Shortly before Mansfield Park was published, Jane Austen began a new novel, Emma, and published it in 1816. Again the heroine, Emma Woodhouse, is difficult to love but, like Fanny Price, does engage the reader's sympathy and understanding. Emma is a girl of high intelligence and vivid imagination who is also marked by egotism and a desire to dominate the lives of others. She exercises her powers of manipulation on a number of neighbors who are not able to resist her prying into their lives. Most of Emma's attempts to control her friends, however, do not have happy effects for her or for them. But influenced by John Knightley, an old friend who is her superior in intelligence and maturity, she realizes how misguided many of her actions are. The novel ends with the decision of a warmer and less headstrong Emma to marry Mr. Knightley. The triviality of some of the characters--particularly Emma's hypochondriac father--distresses many readers, but there is much evidence to support the contention of some critics that Emma is Austen's most brilliant novel. The saturation of a narrow human situation with the author's satirical wit and psychological penetration is here carried to its highest point. Persuasion

Persuasion, begun in 1815 and published posthumously (together with Northanger Abbey) in 1818, is Jane Austen's last complete novel and is perhaps most directly expressive of her feelings about her own life. The heroine, Anne Elliot, is a woman growing older with a sense that life has passed her by. Several years earlier she had fallen in love with Captain Wentworth but was parted from him because her class-conscious family insisted she make a more suitable match. But she still loves Wentworth, and when he again enters her life, their love deepens and ends in marriage. Austen's satirical treatment of social pretensions and worldly motives is perhaps at its keenest in this novel, especially in her presentation of Anne's family. The predominant tone of Persuasion, however, is not satirical but romantic. It is, in the end, the most uncomplicated love story that Jane Austen ever wrote and to some tastes the most beautiful. The novel Sanditon was unfinished at her death in 1817.