]...makes you wonder if Lady Elliot had lived,could she have put alot of this attitude in check with her girls.

I was thinking along these lines myself. I was wondering if the situation had been reversed and Lady Elliot had ended up being the single parent, how might Elizabeth and Mary have turned out. I'm sure they would have been very different girls. Mary may have been a bit predisposed to whining and perhaps there might have been a little vanity in Elizabeth's attitude but surely nothing so over the top as what we see now. I have a theory about Mary and her constant whining about her health: when Lady Elliot died and Anne was sent off to school, the only way she could vie for any attention in a household consisting of Sir Walter and Elizabeth was when she was sick or claiming to be so. :-)