"All the stories are told." But the story of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art comes in again.
Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumously and she left nothing else but a couple of fragments.

One of these, _Lady Susan_, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment of it is equally unfair and futile.

The other, _The Watsons_, has some very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning.

_Persuasion_--which appeared with _Northanger Abbey_ and which, curiously enough, has, like its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene--has also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most sustained work.

And this, like _Emma_, resolutely abstains from even the slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting" story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned throughout with the unfailing condiment--the author's "own sauce"-- of gentle but piquant irony and satire.
It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her results, have appealed to everybody.