PS: As a literary stunt and challenge, the question, how can we do an entertaining and involving novel with an entirely inert heroine and protagonist?, isn't that dissimilar from Umberto Eco's chosen challenge, how can we do a who-done-it where the book is the murderer? (as seen in the Name of the Rose.) And Jane Austen masters the seemingly impossible quite impressively.

It's quite remarkable how postmodern Jane Austen's novels already are. See also Northanger Abbey, where she regularly breaks the 4th wall for a meta-discourse on literature and genres, just to involve the reader again and again, as if she had never ripped the veil – which isn't necessarily black, BTW.

(In this context, it may be also notable how Fanny Price’s apparently keen social observations are really a mirror of the rigorous views and forms conveyed in moral books as characterized by Austen and put up as a foil and antipode to the genre of novels in this meta-discourse, and laughed at in other novels, like in the characters of Mr. Collins and Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. If not for other reasons, Fanny Price is an anti-heroine, just for her anti-novel-ness.)