More Richardson

Sly digs at Richardson resume when Henry Tilney enters the story in Chapter 3. The first is when Henty playfully restarts their conversation by asking Catheruine a series of questions that serve no purpose other than to slip plot details in through dialogue that would have been better included in narration. This is a familiar Richardson device, one he often resorts to because he has no choice but to do so given the limitations of the epistolary style.

No sooner have we gone through this, than Henry asks Catherine how she will portray him in her journal, to which she coyly replies that perhaps she does not keep one. Henry insists that this possibility is no more likely than their not actually being together talking. He then goes on to talk of his certain knowledge of the ways of young women in keeping journals and their natural abilities to write them. This praise turns out to be ironic:

"... it appears to me that the usual style of letter writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars."
"And what are they?"
"A general deficiency of subject, a total innatention to stops and a very frequent ignorance of grammar."

Henry goes on to say that in writing, as in all matters of taste, women are no better and no worse than women. I'd say that's a statement with fairly profound implications ...