Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.
Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto were all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own novels. In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic fiction would be horridly out of place; marriage was, first and foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Certain rules applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and married and what one expected afterwards. To flout these rules was to tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be terrible. Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. In Mansfield Park, for example, Austen gives us Fanny Price, a poor young woman who has grown up in her wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal. The only one who has truly been kind to Fanny is Edmund Bertram, the younger of the family's two sons.
Into this Cinderella existence comes Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, who are visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Soon Mansfield Park is given over to all kinds of gaiety, including a daring interlude spent dabbling in theatricals. Young Edmund is smitten with Mary, and Henry Crawford woos Fanny. Yet these two charming, gifted, and attractive siblings gradually reveal themselves to be lacking in one essential Austenian quality: principle. Without good principles to temper passion, the results can be disastrous, and indeed, Mansfield Park is rife with adultery, betrayal, social ruin, and ruptured friendships. But this is a comedy, after all, so there is also a requisite happy ending and plenty of Austen's patented gentle satire along the way. Describing the switch in Edmund's affections from Mary to Fanny, she writes: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people." What does not vary is the pleasure with which new generations come to Jane Austen. --Alix Wilber
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Complex and Thought-Provoking:
Mansfield Park is the story of Fanny Price, who at ten years old is taken away from her indigent family to live with her rich cousins, the Bertrams of Mansfield Park. Both Fanny's uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, and her Aunt Norris, his sister-in-law, want the distinction of rank preserved between Fanny and her richer cousins. Consequently, Fanny suffers under the tyranny of her Aunt Norris and the neglect of most everyone else at Mansfield Park. The only real exception is her cousin Edmund, who, as Fanny grows... more info
Worth reading:
I love Jane Austen and would actually give this book 4 1/2 stars. It's a little slow in parts but like all of her characters, I loved getting to know Fanny Price. Fannie is a quiet girl who is sent to live with her wealthy uncle. She has a very kind heart and is very patient with her Aunt Norris who loves to "put her in her place". She is often reminding her that she is in a different class than her cousins that she is so fortunate to live with. It is wonderful to watch as Fannie grows into a young woman,... more info
Not about imperialism or slavery:
Since Edward Said wrote his foolish piece on Mansfield Park it has become de rigeur to attach agendas that reflect the intramural (ie bogus) leftism of the academy to novels (sorry texts) Even so this effort to do so in Mansfield Park is particularly outlandish. In fact the question "What is Mansfield Park about" is less interesting than the question "what is it like to read Mansfield Park" To answer that question one has to explore the LANGUAGE of the novel and see where it leads. The plot of Mansfield... more info
Didacticism over Pleasure: A Rare Imbalance in Austen:
In MANSFIELD PARK, Jane Austen expands her sphere of moral vision. In her earlier novels, she focused on the relationships between marriage partners that were framed in a comedic context of how the typical English society of the late 18th century might complicate the likelihood of a series of happy marriages. In this novel, however, she abandons the world of light and trifling romantic comedy for one in which she shows the unpleasant underside of the genteel society that was so noticeably lacking in say,... more info
