We must remember that in the shadow of the French Revolution, the Regency era was a rather repressive era politically and that writers were often scrutinized for adhering to appropriate ideas. Expressing radical ideas was a problem in those times. There is a very interesting book called Jane Austen the Secret Radical, by Helen Kelly that takes a revisionist view of Austen (at least revisionist in the era of Butler). While I find some of her positions hard to swallow, she makes a good case that Jane was very political and that there are numerous clues in all of the books. Of course, that raises the question of what is political? Clearly Jane Austen had issues with a lot of the status quo of Regency society - primogeniture, entails, male domination; her heroines are intelligent, capable women of character. She mocks and chastises British nobility, the class system, and even the Church of England. But she does so in a deeply personal way as each of those impact the story she is telling.