Rose,
Re your comment:
> I think that if Fanny had been responding
> better than it would have been more lasting though
> considering how he turned out, I do not blame her
> for her reaction.
It's interesting to speculate on what might have been. In a way, that's the basis of fan-fiction.
The thing is, Miss Austen's books, though they might not appear so at first, are pretty plot-heavy, and while her characters are always interesting, and her writing style always superb, she never indulges in the navel-gazing that marks so-called "literary fiction." Which is to say, she never lost sight of the the fact that her purpose as a novelist was to tell a story.
That said, it seems to me she planned her plots well ahead of time. That's speculation, of course, but the clockwork precision of her plots, with event following (and caused by) previous event, leads me to conclude that this was the case.
That being the case, I suspect that, in her mind, it was already set in stone that Fanny would wind up with Edmund, not Henry.
That Henry sort of took on a life of his own as she wrote the novel, becoming, not merely charming, but sympathetic, was not enough to deter her from her pre-planned plot. If it even occurred to her that a slightly more welcoming response from Fanny might have actually kept him on the straight and narrow, she probably said to herself, "But she isn't, so he won't."
Like Lady Catherine, Jane Austen formed Edmund and Fanny for each other "from their [metaphorical] cradles," and nothing was going to get in the way of her prearranged ending, least of all the villain's turning out to be someone who might actually be capable of redemption.
JIM D.
