ABSTRACT
Katherine Austen resists an explicit connection between the estate's fertility and human fertility. "Book M" includes Austen's spiritual meditations, sermon notes, comments on her economic status and business affairs, family correspondence, and about thirty-five occasional and religious poems. While her self-fashioning as a prophet in "Book M" contrasts with her self-portrait as an especially weak widow, both roles represent strategies for negotiating the incompatibilities between her gender and her socioeconomic desires. In her self-figuration as a "gentle" widow, Austen not only expresses her awareness of the risks of a second marriage and suspicions of suitors; she also generalizes the threat to widows as potentially coming from any man. Austen's gentle widow is only one aspect of her multi-faceted, discontinuous self-figuration, through which she negotiates the incompatibilities between her socioeconomic ambitions and gender. Her self-figuration as Penelope exposes an inconsistency in her portrait of herself as a gentle, assailable widow.
