Thanks for that excellent post, Jack. Just one additional thought. JA herself tended to let other pens dwell on guilt and misery, and omitted reference to much of the nastier side of life. But the popular recent conception of JA carries this tendency even further. People on this particular board spend a lot of time fighting this rosy-eyed view; we tell those who wished they lived in JA's period all about Fanny Burney's mastectomy without anasthetic.