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Jane Austen-Mansfield Park
The first novel of the author's maturity, Mansfield Park is complex, highly wrought, and experimental. It marks a transitional stage between the first two published novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice , and Jane Austen's greatest achievements, Emma and Persuasion . It has been suggested that Mansfield Park is the writer's most autobiographical novel and that, in seeing through the eyes of Fanny Price, deemed the most moralising and judgemental of her heroines, we are seeing through the eyes of Austen herself. Though Fanny Price may be too virtuous for modern readers to take to their hearts, in Mrs Norris Austen creates one of her best, because most plausible, monsters; while in the estate of Mansfield Park itself we find some of the most fully realised descriptions of domestic interiors and exteriors in Austen's fiction.
This Guide traces the response to Mansfield Park from the opinions
of Jane Austen's contemporaries, through nineteenth-century reviews and twentieth-century critical analyses, including deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist, to diverse twenty-first-century approaches to the novel. Sandie Byrne selects the most useful and insightful of these responses and puts them in context, providing the reader with an essential and approachable introduction to the range of critical debate on this important novel.
This Guide traces the response to Mansfield Park from the opinions
of Jane Austen's contemporaries, through nineteenth-century reviews and twentieth-century critical analyses, including deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist, to diverse twenty-first-century approaches to the novel. Sandie Byrne selects the most useful and insightful of these responses and puts them in context, providing the reader with an essential and approachable introduction to the range of critical debate on this important novel.
310 pages, Hardcover
First published December 17, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 14, 2024
if you can't get with jane austen's political side (incest and all), you're missing out.
August 31, 2025
Such a helpful resource! I use it when teaching on the novel, so it sits on an easily accessible section of my bookshelf.
February 15, 2017
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park
Tony Tanner in his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Mansfield Park, notes that its heroine Fanny Price ‘exhibits few of the qualiies we usually associate with the traditional hero or heroine…. We expect them to have vigour and vitality: Fanny is weak and sickly.’ She is, Tanner maintains, ‘totally passive.’
Unlike, say, Pip in Great Expectations or the eponymous Oliver Twist she has only one reliable friend, Edmund, who is kind to her and teaches her in her schoolwork and at home, and what turns out to being two false friends, the Crawfords, who are, in the nicest possible way, ingratiating and almost too encouraging of her as she becomes available for marriage. So Fanny is poor but good; she struggles not only with her own position, feeling an ourcast in the family, but is burdened with Edmund’s dual problem of a career as a parson and a marriage to the most delightfully realised but treacherous female companion, Mary Crawford. The problem with Edmund is that he is bedazzled by Mary, who with the assistance of Yates and the absence of Sir Thomas on business overseas is persuaded against his better judgement to take part in the play ‘Lovers’ Vows’ where he plays opposite Mary to the undoing of both.
But Mansfield Park is, like all her other novels, a comedy, although a dark one, which the reader feels almost tips into tragedy for some of the characters such as the Bertram girls, who are in the book to learn their lesson not to trust their passions, especially when faced by such charming schemers as the Crawfords.
This is my favourite Jane Austen novel because the characters are on the whole realistically portrayed, thanks to the author’s persistent commentary and voice-over tecnique of speaking for the characters without becoming unduly intrusive. True, Jane Austen makes moral pronouncements throughout, but she uses the omniscient narrator who prefers hints rather than telling all. Her access to the inner lives of her major characters is subtly handled, never telling all about motive or intent.
Tony Tanner in his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Mansfield Park, notes that its heroine Fanny Price ‘exhibits few of the qualiies we usually associate with the traditional hero or heroine…. We expect them to have vigour and vitality: Fanny is weak and sickly.’ She is, Tanner maintains, ‘totally passive.’
Unlike, say, Pip in Great Expectations or the eponymous Oliver Twist she has only one reliable friend, Edmund, who is kind to her and teaches her in her schoolwork and at home, and what turns out to being two false friends, the Crawfords, who are, in the nicest possible way, ingratiating and almost too encouraging of her as she becomes available for marriage. So Fanny is poor but good; she struggles not only with her own position, feeling an ourcast in the family, but is burdened with Edmund’s dual problem of a career as a parson and a marriage to the most delightfully realised but treacherous female companion, Mary Crawford. The problem with Edmund is that he is bedazzled by Mary, who with the assistance of Yates and the absence of Sir Thomas on business overseas is persuaded against his better judgement to take part in the play ‘Lovers’ Vows’ where he plays opposite Mary to the undoing of both.
But Mansfield Park is, like all her other novels, a comedy, although a dark one, which the reader feels almost tips into tragedy for some of the characters such as the Bertram girls, who are in the book to learn their lesson not to trust their passions, especially when faced by such charming schemers as the Crawfords.
This is my favourite Jane Austen novel because the characters are on the whole realistically portrayed, thanks to the author’s persistent commentary and voice-over tecnique of speaking for the characters without becoming unduly intrusive. True, Jane Austen makes moral pronouncements throughout, but she uses the omniscient narrator who prefers hints rather than telling all. Her access to the inner lives of her major characters is subtly handled, never telling all about motive or intent.
January 20, 2009
AFter the movie, I thought Mansfield Park among Austen's best novels. The theme of repressed sexuality in particular seemed to give her a more complete understanding of human nature than her other works. Now, reading the book itself, I discover it isn't there, someone on the movie project thought they knew better than Jane Austen. Mansfield Park, is in fact much more modest that the Austen's best, shorter, less well drawn characters (the single exception of Fanny Price notwithstanding), and character development less complete. Still, we are talking about THE Jane Austen, and her mediocre is head and shoulders above most other romantic stories--especially today's genre, indentured to greedy and oligarchic publishers and written to spec. Read it, by all means.
November 17, 2009
I haven't actually read Jane Austen for quite a while. Why haven't I? I liked this book quite a bit, not for the romantic angst so popular in Jane Austen movie renditions, but because of her character studies. I did find her Fannie almost too good to be true. But I am terribly afraid that she painted me as a mother in all truth and honesty. Okay, not entirely me, but oh, the parts that are! I'm still trembling from the reflection I saw--and I will reform. I will!
August 20, 2008
I listened to this - as I do with most books these days, and the reader was great as was the book. I thoroughly enjoyed Austen's style of writing..
August 5, 2011
My least favorite Jane Austen.
March 15, 2017
Great book, but quite of a repulsive ending. Ew.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 18, 2008
Yes, I love Jane Austen. Again, this is a great play on characters and propriety.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 29, 2012
I do enjoy Austen's with, but ... P and P is so good that her other books do pale in comparison.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews