Mansfield Park

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So after the influx of fantasy that I have been reading, I figured it was time to go back to something a little higher-brow, classic, and from The Book. So this week I indulged in what is fast becoming a guilty pleasure of mine, a period romp in the form of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

This classic novel is one of Austen’s more sober and dramatic stories, telling the tale of heroine Fanny Price who is ‘rescued’ from her overcrowded and impoverished family by a rich relative and sent to be raised with her uncle, aunt, and cousins in Mansfield Park. Treated as the outsider and effectively orphaned, neglected, and constantly humiliated by her cousins- bar one- and her second aunt, Fanny’s unwavering gentle nature and strong principals of virtue and pure, good manners, take root and grow stronger amid the corruption, selfishness, and scandal that engulfs the young people of Mansfield Park.

In Mansfield Park Jane Austen attacks all her signature themes, the three Ms: matrimony, money, and manner. Fanny as a heroine is one of the most surprisingly strong and inspiring women in literature, despite her overt femininity being a tad off-putting, especially for modern readers. While she spends the entire book judging the people around her (especially her cousins and friends of her sex), pining for the love of a man who is captivated by another, and being prone to great attacks of anxiety and hysteria, it is Fanny who is more or less the only person in the novel to come out sublimely happy at the end.

In her traditional fashion, Austen weaves a great story of social criticism and commentary, mocking the pretensions and idylls of the rich, highlighting their hypocrisies and double standards, and generally throwing shade on the vulgar manners of the materially beautiful and adorned. Though written in her classic, witty, and eloquent prose, there is an inherent hint of bitchiness that flavours the entire novel, making it a real page-turner, considering the dull (by modern standards) content.

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Where readers might be used to funny or distressing misinterpretations that then get resolved in a great, romantic happy endings like Sense & Sensibility or Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park delivers a most climactic bout of drama and scandal and then leaves it to fester as in reality. There is no drawn out suspense as we await Marianne to overcome a fever, or Wichkam and Lydia to be discovered, the consequences of Mansfield Park are resolved and the pains eased with the passing of time, but the characters continue to suffer: seemingly in punishment for their own misaligned characters and their actions towards Fanny. This delivers another level of enjoyment to the book as it shows a most agreeable degree of author-character attachment and Austen, who refers directly to herself within the final chapter, enters even more actively into the polygamous book-and-reader relationship.

Though both similar and unlike her other revered stories, Mansfield Park is officially one of my favourite Austen novels, a true classic.

Author: Jane Austen

Published: 1814 by T. Eggerton (London)