I've posted a few times about how I've noticed that many things in NA foreshadow situations and characters we'll see in JA's later work. This is a good example that I had not noticed.

This is very similar to Emma. Many have remarked that if Emma was written by a 'conventional' novelist, Jane Fairfax would have been the heroine. She is doomed to a life as a governess instead of a gentlewoman like Miss Campbell. She meets a man and agrees to a secret engagement. She later finds herself repeatedly in contact with him and in a quest to conceal the engagement has to witness him apparently 'making love' to another woman. And still she gets her man in the end.

It shows how Jane Austen was consistently able to look at characters and see the world from their perspective. That's probably why her characters were so rich, well developed and human. And it shows that after formulating her vision of the characters, she was able to pick the most interesting, albeit unconventional, story.