I've read this passage a hundred times or so, and I don't think it says anything that I didn't see, but perhaps I'm wrong. The Henry Dashwoods lived at Stanhill before they moved in to Norland, and when they moved, according to Fanny, the furniture at Stanhill was sold (excepting the china, plate, and linen, which they later say was part of Mrs. Dashwood's dowry). Can we understand from this information exactly how Henry Dashwood had possession of Stanhill? I think he could not have been a tenant, since he could sell the furniture. He could not have had only a life interest, same reasoning. If it were his own property, a freehold, wouldn't it have been better for the interest of the Dashwood women if he had just rented the house when they stopped living there? I'm grappling with the sequence of events that led them all to Norland and then to Barton, and I think there must be some kind of legal nuance I don't know, but I can't seem to track it down.

I moved this post over from S&S, but wanted to update that I read a little on entail and think it might be a plausible scenario that Henry Dashwood was the grandson of the last entailer of Stanhill, and that he did not sign an entail contract himself, so he was free to sell the property. I read this in Poole, but it seems like it would have been a fairly unusual scenario. Thoughts?