She agreed to marry an heir to a large estate, but changed her mind the next day. She then rejected a clergyman, Edward Bridges, and sometimes regretted her refusal. There is a sadness in this pattern. She felt the importance placed on marriage by a society whose values she upheld, and could not settle for the mediocre possibilities on offer. Any man who might have married her and who, like us, had access to her letters and novels, might be forgiven for thinking he had spared himself some painful exposure.
Husbands are usually on display as former suitors, or as fathers, rather than as husbands.
Her correspondence, brilliantly sharp about friends and relatives, would certainly have held back from disloyal comments on someone to whom she felt she owed deference. This deference would not have obscured her perception of shortcomings or clouded her critical sense. Perhaps it was a need to hold these in check that ultimately made her shrink from a commitment to the married state, to which it would never occur to her to question her loyalty. But even as she completed this tender and elegiac work, another side of her was preparing, in the unfinished ''Sanditon,'' a merciless satire on crazed romantic sensibilities, in a idiom reminiscent of the uproarious burlesques she wrote in her youth. Nokes's biography does not, except in passing, critically discuss Austen's writings.