How shrewd is Mary’s reading of other people? She is very good at reading people who are something like her—she understands Julia, Maria, Tom and her London friends. She easily reads the easy to read people like her sister, Mrs. Norris, Lady Bertram and Mr. Rushworth and I think she is perceptive of Dr. Grant but there is little shrewdness involved in reading either set of folks. Mary understands Henry to a fair degree but probably less than one might expect—she did not understand he would be unwilling to provide a respectable home in her time of need and was blind to his weaknesses in pushing him to stay for Mrs. Frasier’s party. Mary has little understanding of Sir Thomas but seems to really miss the mark with Fanny and Edmund because they are so fundamentally different. I am not suggesting she ought to be able to fully understand them but she knows of their religious sentiments which alone ought to suggest to her a great incompatibility of opinion especially on serious subjects. From Sotherton to the elopement Mary consistently misreads them even when they express opposing views or obvious shock as Edmund does when she brings up the folly of their two relations (47)—it is almost willfully misunderstanding on the basis of no one can truly think differently than I. It seems to me Mary is a creature of her London society and mostly unable to think outside her personal box. (:D)