Jane Austen's prose has always been presented to us with adjectives like transparent, concise, elegant, limpid, lucid, lapidary, and most of all clear. Austen certainly did bring an exceptional degree of economy to the English novel. This chapter presents a few examples from Austen's early work to illustrate that Austen is often deliberately very hard to understand on the simplest level of sense. From the very outset of her career, Austen is committed to vexing, disrupting, stymying the process of sense making, to slowing us down. All of Austen's novels bring their protagonists to crises of intelligibility, and, it's worth stressing, only admirable characters find themselves in quandaries. But the real benefit of approaching Austen as a difficult rather than a simple writer is that we become more inclined to slow down and marvel at her artfulness.