238 PERSUASIONS N o. 33 MODERN FAMILY has nothing on Jane Austen. Austen’s endings rework the mores of English villages, confined small-town communities that necessi- tate getting along with neighbors and relatives since, as in the scripts of tele- vision sitcom, there is no getting away from them. Austen’s imperturbable comic resolutions, thronged with relationships that would be colloquially called “incestuous” today, carry this tolerant or at least courteous inclusive- ness to its apogee, a live-and-let-live that would be inconceivable to a brittle personality. A crowd in a little room—one can but imagine the future family gathering that brings Mrs. William Elliot, formerly Mrs. Clay, and her hus- band together with Mrs. Frederick Wentworth and Miss Elliot. To refer to Persuasion is to skip ahead; the gathered loose ends of all of Austen’s happy endings look unholily entertaining, once detached from the control of the author’s delicate prose. Even in Northanger Abbey, the earliest and least complex of the novels, Catherine’s happy marriage to Henry Tilney gives her as brother-in-law Captain Tilney, the flirtatious jilt who broke up the engagement between Catherine’s beloved brother James and her former best friend, Isabella Thorpe. Catherine has already clarified naively to Henry and Eleanor that she does not like their brother at all. The possibility that this cad- dish brother will be on hand at future weddings, christenings, funerals, and holi- days, however, is not dwelt on by Catherine. Nor does it surface in the narrative, where it is overpowered on the level of plot by the General’s offensive behavior and on a meta-critical level by a cheerfully provided grab-bag husband for Comic Resolution, Humorous Loose Ends in Austen’s Novels MARGIE BURNS Margie Burns (Ph.D. English literature, Renaissance/ Shakespeare) teaches English as a lecturer part-time at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and works as a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications including Shakespeare Studies, Gale CourseReader: Shakespeare, Academe, CHE, Legal Times, general- readership newspapers, and Persuasions.