In the final chapter of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen allows the authorial 'I' to put in an appearance. This is her opening paragraph:
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.Quite a postmodern passage you might think, forcing it upon the attention of her readers that she is the creator of these people, Fanny Price, Edmund, Henry and Mary Crawford, and all the others in her cast of characters. She can restore them forthwith (or, at any rate, some of them) to tolerable comfort. Just like that. Shrewd as ever, though, Austen doesn't allow that thought to settle before following up, immediately, with this one:
My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt, or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was useful, she was beloved; she was safe from Mr. Crawford...Fanny must have been happy, she had compelling sources of delight - and this Jane Austen has the satisfaction of (factively) knowing, rather than simply determining. No sooner than it has been put in question, the reality of the world of Mansfield Park is reaffirmed. What is to be made of this swift one-two?
She's reminding us that her story is mere fiction and, the reminder once delivered, returning inside the fiction that Fanny and the others are real people. Alternatively, no - they are real people, those whose story she tells; but, as the teller, she has her rights and so may 'restore' some of them to tolerable comfort by a quicker rather than a slower telling.
A few pages later, look:
I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.She's done it again! We're all at liberty, seemingly, to decide on our own date for Edmund to be over his attachment to Mary Crawford, as if the whole thing were just made up. But - the author then says (and you better believe it) - his getting over her happened at the time that it 'naturally' would and 'not a week earlier'.
Only one conclusion is possible. Jane Austen anticipated the folly that goes under the name of postmodernism and delivered it a sound kick. She tempts her readers with the suggestion that this is all mere play of the mind, then corrects them by her insistence that there's a reality out there that constrains even the novelist, even the creator of fictions - in its way.