Begun in 1811 at the height of Jane Austen’s writing powers and published in 1814, Mansfield Park marks a conscious break from the tone of her first three novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, the last of which Austen came to see as ‘rather too light.’ Fanny Price is unlike any of Austen’s previous heroines, a girl from a poor family brought up in a splendid … brought up in a splendid country house and possessed of a vast reserve of moral fortitude and imperturbability. She is very different from Elizabeth Bennet, but is the product of the same inspired imagination.
Mansfield Park shows Austen as a mature novelist with an almost unparalleled ability to render character and an acute awareness of her world and how it was changing. Through the stories of Fanny Price, the Bertrams, and the Crawfords, she tackles the themes of faith and constancy and the threat that metropolitan manners could pose to a rural way of life. Mansfield Park is as amusing as any of Austen’s novels, but, according to the critic Tony Tanner, it is also arguable that it is ‘her most profound novel (indeed… it is one of the most profound novels of the nineteenth century).’
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When people rave about Jane Austen, they do not usually mention Mansfield Park. It seems to be the ugly stepchild of her six full-length novels, and you rarely hear anyone claim Fanny Price as their favorite heroine. But I’ve always loved this story of shy, sweet, and smart orphan Fanny, who goes to live with her wealthy cousins at their titular estate, and falls in love with Edward, also shy, sweet, smart, and yes, a bit of a goody-goody. While many think their story is boring compared to that of Lizzie and Darcy, Emma and Mr. Knightley, or Marianne and Willoughby, Fanny and Edward’s love story is perhaps more adult and mature than the rest (maybe with the exception of Persuasion’s Anne and Captain Wentworth) — it’s based on familiar devotion and fierce loyalty, and a true kindness of heart and similarity of spirit and mind. And don’t discount a couple of the twists and turns and surprises and glimpses of darkness (an affair! slavery! poverty and squalor!). MF might not be the most exciting of Austen’s novels, but there is still much to cherish here and learn from.
Mansfield Park seems to appear quite frequently on people’s “least favourite Austen book” lists, but I’ve enjoyed all my readings of it. I actually like timid, frail little Fanny, whose heart is a good deal warmer than those of the more flamboyant female characters. She’s affectionate, loyal, and prepared to stick to what she feels to be right even though she suffers all the more for it because she’s so powerless.
But Fanny is not a beguiling heroine to hang a whole novel on, and Austen does not attempt to. Mansfield Park is a rich and complex work, with ambiguous characters, plots within plots, and layers of symbolism that aren’t what I usually associate with Jane. Her use of the play “Lovers’ Vows” is sheer brilliance in what it shows us of the characters and their entwined relationships, even down to the fate of the performance itself. On a smaller scale, the game of “Speculation” does something similar.
Mary Crawford can be seen as a portrait of what Elizabeth Bennet might be if she had all the wit and liveliness we love, but without solid virtue at her core. Mrs Norris is, I think, Austen’s nastiest female character (in the six novels, at least; I’m not counting Lady Susan). She makes Lady Catherine seem like a cuddly granny. Edmund is very silly for most of the book, but it’s (mostly) convincing, and it’s forgivable, because he gets there in the end. Henry Crawford plays the villain, but he had a very good chance of being the hero.
The editor of my edition says he considers Mansfield Park “one of the most profound novels of the nineteenth century”, which is high praise indeed. I’ll content myself with saying I like it very much.
I tried to read this one for the second time, and finally managed to make it all the way through, but I definitely see why I struggled the first time though. Since I was listening to the audio version (and I’m usually multitasking at the time) I actually had to stop about an hour or so in, and read a summary of what I’d listened to thus far: it was that boring. The summary definitely helped, though.
This was the gist: Fanny is taken in by her aunt and uncle, who don’t think very much of her. She falls in love with her cousin Edmund, but he thinks of her as a sister. She is (like all Austin’s heroines) quiet and serious, and with the help of a contrived play in which Edmund and a flashy, flighty neighbor named Mary are cast as lovers, Edmund decides that Mary is the woman of his dreams and proceeds to ascribe to her all the wonderful qualities that she in truth lacks, and Fanny really possesses. Meanwhile, Mary’s brother Henry, equally dashing and vapid, at first decides he will make a game of getting Fanny to fall for him, but then he actually does seem to fall in love with her himself. Everyone pressures Fanny to accept him, but even though it appears for all the world that Edmund is already lost to her forever, she cannot betray her own heart–and besides, despite appearances, she doesn’t trust Henry.
Almost the entire novel is wrapped up in Edmund’s romance with Mary and final discovery of her true nature, while Fanny is ultimately proved right about Henry as he finds himself embroiled in a scandal. I was stunned when I reached the last few minutes of the book, and (spoiler alert) Edmund still had not fallen in love with Fanny. In fact, the event occurs in the span of one sentence, pretty much. The entire book sets us up for an event we never get to see at all! Definitely Jane Austen’s worst book in my opinion.
My rating: **
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: none
Politcal content: none
Mansfield Park is one of the darker and more twisted Austen novels about a social world largely gone wrong. It bears a resemblance to Dangerous Liaisons, a 1782 French novel, and is early enough to have influenced 1847’s Jane Eyre with which it also shares plots points. It also contains elements we will see again in Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel Being There. The hero is cousin Fanny who gets tossed out of the household she was born into because there are too many children and into her uncle’s house, where she is mostly miserable because of being constantly reminded by grownups and female cousins alike that she is a charity case. Only her uncle and a boy cousin are halfway decent to her. This is Austen’s book about what’s wrong with the leisure class and it’s that they’ve never had anything happen to them like what’s happened to Fanny. They’ve never been in a circumstance in which they are the outcast and picked on and excluded. They’ve always had a safety net, too, so they don’t fear most misfortunes. A brother and sister — Henry and Mary Crawford — decide to play a sort of trick on Fanny in which the brother will start a flirtation with her and try to get her to fall in love with him. Neither can imagine a desperate case like Fanny not grabbing on to the nearest eligible man for dear life. But Henry can’t believe it when she doesn’t want him and so ups the ante and asks her uncle for her hand. When Fanny says no, her refusal to marry a man who has figured out how to seem like his culture’s pinnacle of perfection then loses her the one support she had in her uncle. Fanny hardly gets to do anything in this novel. Though if she has been passive up til now, it’s because her situation is so precarious she has hardly dared to move. Now, simply by saying no to people who aren’t used to it, she manages to start the whole rotten edifice toppling and it becomes a question of who will still be standing at the end.
Austen provides a very insightful critique upon various elements of human nature. However, the composition of the events towards the end of the book appear to be rather contrived, as though they hastened towards an unconvincing, fairytale ending that had been (for good reason) pushed further and further from reach. Yet before an intangible, nominal conclusion, the reader has much to appreciate in each character’s virtues and faults, alike. Austen’s observations remain a timeless masterpiece.