I tried to answer in the first instance without getting too far away from my own words. I’m glad you found it helpful. What sounds like the most authoritative treatment of the theme you are pursuing here is Tara Ghoshal Wallace’s Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (Macmillan, 1995). But there are also fascinating essays, one or two of them, in David Lodge’s After Bakhtin (Routledge, 1990), which shows the complications involved when narrative voice [Plato’s ‘diegesis’ in book three of The Republic] is contaminated by “mimesis”, or the voices or consciousness of the characters in a fictional work. There are also interesting points in the Judy Simons collection on Mansfield Park and Persuasion reviewed on this site [second page of the book reviews]. Consult the review -- and perhaps you might find the index to the book helpful in pursuing your enquiries. However, my first answer perhaps also implied one shouldn’t succumb to “critic-itis”, as you may, it seems, be tempted to do. Have confidence in your ability to develop your own ideas from close reading of my text: after all, that is what anyone reading your work will finally be looking out for, rather than the words of (the) others, however good the pointers they initially provide.

The narrator’s sparkling mischief-joy at the prospect of Fanny’s triumph as she settles to being Sir Thomas’s true daughter by spiritual affiliation and Edmund’s eminently suitable clergyman’s wife, itself seems to summon the lively spirit of Mary Crawford to celebrate the quiet Fanny’s rewards for all she has had previously to endure – which included Sir Thomas’s anger, Aunt Norris’s scolding, and Edmund’s obtuseness (“I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion . . .”). My narrator shrinks into a kind of ironic agnosticism about things here, (“it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment”, partly because the fates of Norris and Maria, whom she’s discussing here, are dulled by distance from Mansfield, where the paradoxically presiding genius of the silent Fanny is as central to the narrator’s musings as Mansfield itself is.

But the joke of the narrator’s not quite knowing what happened also derived from the fact that I had already had many speculations from friends and relatives who read the work in progress as to how Mansfield Park should turn out that I dramatised the idea of the narrator’s becoming merely “one of the throng” of theorists as to what should happen in or to Mansfield in general and Fanny and Henry Crawford in particular. Indeed, we might think my narrator is a little biased at times here, for example when referring to “the good feelings by which she was almost entirely governed” when describing Mary Crawford’s noble indignation in the face of Mrs. Norris’s abuse of Fanny. There may be further instances of this, and, in general – yes, my narrator in Mansfield Park certainly “wants watching”. Perhaps you might find some more interesting instances of narratorly behaviour or bias in the novel? With best wishes. Jane Austen.

You might also consider the implications of some aspects of the presentation -- Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s quite winning version of Sense and Sensibility makes it a post-romantic work, which focussed partly on “the world of the child”. This was rather against the spirit of the original (my work tended to emphasise how easy it was to idealise children falsely, and to spoil them!) Or you might use notions of how even sophisticated treatments like the Andrew Davies adaptation of Emma fail to provide a correct rendition of secondary characters like Mr. Weston, disturbing the complex interrelationship of theme, character and (gulp!) “ideology”. None of this might interest you, of course. Presentation and representation are interesting issues; or the way the characters express antithetical attitudes to life, the universe and everything. Or what about questions of style – mine was very much indebted to eighteenth century practice -- Dr. Johnson’s, for example: you might argue that my novels are not particularly “realistic” by Victorian or post-Victorian standards, picking various features and instances. The main thing, in the end, is to develop a critical argument of your own and make all the details you adduce in your discussion minister to it – easier said than done, tho’. Isn’t advice annoying? Have fun, my dear.

In general, I certainly lend myself to some forms of discussion of women’s position – for example, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice deal centrally with talented, meritorious young women, sister-pairs like Elinor and Marianne and Jane and Elizabeth, corresponding somewhat to real-life me and my elder sister Cassandra ourselves, perhaps -- under economic pressure and aware of the social forces which threaten to govern their life-choices in particularly constraining ways. But the novels don’t necessarily repeat themselves in this respect, or others.

You might like to consider the importance of thinking of me as a sort of “moving target” (“’Jane Austen’ describes variety rather than uniformity” as a theme: one novel may even in some measure to correct or contradict another, as Mansfield Park does Pride and Prejudice (cf., e.g., the heroines), and Persuasion does Emma (cf., e.g., the attitude to the country gentry and class). You might wish to develop such ideas of development to give a different view of a couple of the novels. Or you might wish to focus on close-reading of a particular novel rather than the movement from novel to novel, throwing new light on its significance – is a novel in fact best described as merely a story, or an impression of how things are, or positively as a kind of argument, possibly a political one? . With best wishes, Jane Austen.