I don't typically read literary criticism, but this book on Austen's work is so readable. It's got the incisive commentary of a historian with the conversational tone of a fandom meta writer. Harding was not reading as an English lit scholar, but as an intelligent person who loves Austen. A must-read for all Austen fans, which will open your eyes to all sorts of interpretations you never considerd.

The title relates to what Harding sees as Austen's view of and attitude toward society. She was fundamentally not someone writing about a society she was comfortable in, and her characters are often not entirely comfortable with each other - there is a regulated hatred, negative emotions that are not allowed to be passionate or impolite. While this makes some consider the books stultifying, it's realistic, especially when the rules of politeness required significantly more social contact with people one didn't like.

My one quarrel with the book is that Harding clearly dislikes Fanny Price a great deal and can find almost no sympathy for her. I wouldn't say Mansfield Park is my favorite of the books, but I don't believe she was trying to write a straightforward moralizing novel either. (I subscribe to the view, whose author I can no longer remember, that MP represents a deliberate subversion of the ending that would be more common in fiction and more satisfying than what she wrote. She knew what she was doing.)