"I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable."

Today was improved by this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFrFhwMQMXg

I was going to do a paragraph on how weird that part in "Persuasion" is where the narrator starts effusing about the landscape of Lyme, and how at first I thought that was because Austen's scope ("that little bit of ivory (two inches wide) on which I paint with so fine a brush") is so limited that even the slightest divergence from it stands out as odd, but now I think it has to do with the author obtruding her opinions into the narrative. Which I think is similar to what happens earlier on, when the narrator describes the Musgroves' no-good son who dies at sea, and is extremely harsh about him and his grieving mother for no obvious narrative or thematic reason. It's the sort of thing I think I might need biographical details to explain: were no-good young sailors with poor spelling skills a feature in Austen's life? Was she just upset that day? Were all the other books full of this sort of thing before she revised them? (But surely she did revise "Persuasion" before she died.)

But then I thought that might be boring. So you get a meta-paragraph instead.