"Jane Austen … provides, at scores of points, a commentary that corrects any naive over-identification that we are tempted to commit. … Many readers have resisted that corrective. … Critics have often objected, for example, to the presence of a persistent voice that could allow itself, at what conventionally should have been the moment of supreme passion, to undermine the conventional effects with the famous (or infamous) narrative intrusion. … Some readers have considered such passages to be dodges, signs of Austen's own sexual inhibitions or lack of novelistic skill. … I suggest instead that they are signs of a novelist who knows her double task: how to abide by the demands of a conventional form, while making the whole thing work for matters unconventional."