alt Hacker NewsIt may be important to note that all of Austen's novels are set up and kept going by an essential flaw in the hero characters. And Fanny Price is the ultimate anti-hero: indeed, she is hardly a heroine, she doesn't act, at all, she has no arc, she just clings to the first thing she encounters. While the world is moving and swirling around her, she doesn't move at all, not for lack of opportunity, but as a character trait (and, at times, by sheer luck, as in the theatre episode, thus earning her uncle's regard). And, in the end, it's all for nothing: while she got everything, she may have wanted to embrace, and even more, she is untouched by it and (quite literally) still where she started. It's quite literally about first attachments, not just in the domain of romance (like in Sense and Sensibility), but to about everything. Or, rather, first possessions, as in the first room, she may call her own, the first person, she talks to, etc.
How Austen constructs a plausible environment for such a character and what she does with this world and its characters is quite astounding – and hilarious. And, as you said, there are actually serious topics discussed.
Even more astounding is maybe how modern adaptations try to render this as "how our quick and cunning girl stirs up that lame family and wins everything."
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Mrs Norris is also superbly well personified. She knows the worth of a roll of green baize. Her life and livelihood depends on it.
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.)