John Mullan

Many of the parental relations

in her novels are either non-existent because the parents are dead, and that's important to the plot sometimes, or extremely difficult because otherwise there wouldn't be a novel.

All happy families are alike, that Tolstoyan sort of dictum.

You need

problem parents to write fiction sometimes.

And so even arguably the closest heroin parent relation in all Jane Austen's fiction, that between Elizabeth Bennet and her father,

He is very flawed.

And you realize that in the course of reading the novel.

And it's a difficult realization because he's also one of the most amusing and intelligent men in all Jane Austen's novels and difficult not to be disarmed by him.

But of course, there were also dreadful mothers, dreadful fathers.

Oh, I mean, Sir Walter Elliot, how terrible can you get?

Mr Woodhouse, a life tending to Mr Woodhouse with his killer phrase, gentle selfishness.

You know, what about Mansfield Park?

I mean, oh, your real parents are terrible.

Your substitute parents are terrible.

They're all terrible in brilliantly amusing and different ways for the reader.

but all impossible for poor fanny price so either absent or terrible parents seems to be sort of the rule in jane austen and even a really affectionate mother like mrs dashwood in sense and sensibility she's a good person she loves her daughter she does her best

But she's endlessly making misjudgments and indulging some of the worst aspects of her offspring.

Eleanor can't rely on her at all.

She has to find her own sort of decisions and judgments about the world.