Mansfield Park (Signet Classics (Paperback)) Jane Austen
Publisher: Signet Book
ISBN: 0451526295
Edition: Mass Market Paperback; 1996-08-01
Summary:
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
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