From her juvenilia to the drama of Persuasion and Sanditon, Jane Austen shows a persistent fascination with the variability of objects for love. Throughout Austen's fiction love is dramatized as an essentially unfocused emotional disposition that happens to be turned to a particular end only through the chance disposition of circumstances. As has been observed from the time of Sir Walter Scott's review of her work in 1815, hers is an extremely unsentimental version of love. The power of circumstances in her work has also been observed quite often. Less noted, however, has been the close connection between Austen's lack of sentimentality and her general emphasis upon the power of casual circumstances in determining the success or failure of communication between individuals. That is to say, love's object is variable in Austen's world because her people can never understand each other completely, only partially and provisionally. The lack of sentimentality in her work is due to this lack of understanding and the need to protect oneself against it, and the ultimate cause of this lack of understanding is an absence of stability and wholeness in the society she describes.