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eventual happy union with the hero. In the first, Elinor Dashwood represents another aspect of Jane Austen as the patient, high-principled young woman who quietly watches and waits while almost everyone else around her behaves foolishly or badly, until finally the erring hero can be freed from the little `Temptress' who had him in her clutches and returns contritely to the admirable and constant Elinor. In the second we see the heroine Catherine Morland as herself a rather foolish girl who has to learn her lesson before she can be united with the admirable and constant hero Henry Tilney; and here it has been plausibly suggested that there is more of Jane Austen in the shrewd, ironical Tilney than in the heroine.

By the time her first three novels had been completed but not yet published, Jane Austen had been through the greatest disappointment of her life, when her one true love, James Lefroy, a penniless would-be lawyer, had been torn away from her by his family, on the grounds that, as an equally penniless clergyman's daughter, she would not be a suitable match. She then suffered a further devastating blow when her father retired, handing over the rectory which had been her home and workplace to her brother. Forced to move with her parents to lodgings in Bath, she felt so dislocated that she broke off from writing for a decade. But when she was finally able to settle down in a Hampshire cottage with her sister Cassandra, she embarked on the intensive burst of writing which between 1811 and 1816 produced three more novels, now reflecting the fact that she was no longer a young girl with every expectation of marriage but a spinster on the way to middle-age, who had seen her hopes of marriage dashed. Partly this was through the inadequacy of the men she had met; partly because of her own intimidating intelligence and sharp eye for other people's faults.

All three novels are still shaped perfectly round the Comedy theme, showing a heroine who against all odds finally achieves the happy ending of marriage, and again we see the same contrasted aspects of Jane's own personality projected into their three, very different central characters. Fanny Price, the poor little heroine introduced into the household of her rich cousins in Mansfield Park, is like a rerun of Elinor Dashwood, as the unshakeably moral young woman who watches while all the other young men and women around her behave foolishly and progressively get caught out; until finally the contrite hero Edmund comes to recognise what a rock of good sense and true feeling she had been, the only one who saw the world straight and did not betray herself.

The second of the three, Emma, is perhaps the most remarkable of all Jane Austen's variations on the Comedy plot, not least because, as in The Taming of the Shrew, we see the rare spectacle of the heroine as the chief `dark' figure of the story. Emma Woodhouse, the only child of a weak, valetudinarian father, is a bossy, wilful girl of powerful personality, prone both to be severely critical of other people's weaknesses and to try to organise their lives. In this sense, as an `active' heroine, she is like a darker, more interfering, more self-destructive version of Elizabeth Bennett. Only one person, Mr Knightley, has the strength of character to stand up to Emma and the shrewdness of heart to recognise that beneath her capacity for bossy self-deception there is a potentially sensitive, feminine and lovable girl being stifled by her domineering outward persona. The `recognition' takes place when, as Emma is finally caught out in her match-making on behalf of Harriet, by trying to bring her young protegee together with Mr Knightley, she `comes to herself' in realising what a fool she has been, and that it is really she herself who loves Mr Knightley. In her foolish persona she had completely overlooked the fact that he was her proper `other half'. But equally, if she had not discovered her other, softer, repressed identity, he would never have accepted her. Her true inner feminine self has to be rescued from the shadows into