Anne Elliot's ‘whining and spoilt sister Mary’, remarks her biographer, Park Honan, is ‘one of Jane Austen's funniest people’. Others may differ. ‘She is not funny’, Tony Tanner declares, ‘she is unbearable’. Mary Musgrove's hypochondria is displayed on her sister's arrival at Uppercross. ‘It was rather a surprise to her to find Mary alone; but being alone, her being unwell and out of spirits, was almost a matter of course’ (P 37). Stretched out on the faded sofa in the drawing room, fancying herself ill and neglected, herself neglecting her children, Mary is scarcely more than a contemptible emblem of the idle gentle-woman's life. Hypochondria has taken many forms in Jane Austen, from Fanny Dashwood's hysterics and Mrs Bennet's nerves, to Mr Woodhouse's biliousness, but it is represented now as no more than one of the banalities of genteel existence. Mary's complaints do not even reach the dignity of a proper name. ‘I do not think I ever was so ill in my life as I have been all this morning – very unfit to be left alone I am sure. Suppose I were to be seized all of a sudden in some dreadful way, and not able to ring the bell!’ (37), she moans. Her unspecific ‘illness’ is a psychosomatic substitute for flattery and self-importance, a metaphor for boredom and the sense of ill-usage that corrodes her existence, filling for her those vacuities of the gentlewoman's life which are experienced too, in their different ways, by her sisters Elizabeth and Anne.