Mansfield Park in Easley Library Bookworms

Sep 14, 2019 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: general-fiction, classics

Note, Feb. 14, 2024: I've just made a minor edit to this review (to delete a comparison to another author that I've concluded might not be correct).

With my closing the last page of Mansfield Park, I've completed my goal of reading every one of Jane Austen's novels. Austen is a writer I count as a favorite (and, if there was a way to rank my "top favorites" on Goodreads, she'd be in that more select circle as well!); I've really liked all of her work, and consider this and several of her other no Note, Feb. 14, 2024: I've just made a minor edit to this review (to delete a comparison to another author that I've concluded might not be correct).

With my closing the last page of Mansfield Park, I've completed my goal of reading every one of Jane Austen's novels. Austen is a writer I count as a favorite (and, if there was a way to rank my "top favorites" on Goodreads, she'd be in that more select circle as well!); I've really liked all of her work, and consider this and several of her other novels outstanding. Many of my general comments on her literary vision, excellent prose style, and the other characteristics of her writing, made in other reviews, would apply here as well. Here as elsewhere, she builds a penetrating novel of manners around a young single lady of genteel lineage (though, in Fanny Price's case, she's a "poor relation" to the family in Mansfield Park, the titular estate --her mother and Lady Bertram are sisters, but the former married a man distinctly less well-heeled), and in the process places the English country gentry in her Regency era under an unsparing microscope. As always in Austen, couples will pair up here (and whether the right pairs will form up is a concern). But Fanny's not husband-shopping, and the authorial concerns here are about much more than romance: about questions of right and wrong, what's important in life, healthy and unhealthy family relationships, and more. (That's also quite typical for Austen!)

I read this book in the omnibus edition of all seven of Austen's completed novels from Gramercy Books (which is enhanced by some reproductions of Hugh Thomson's 19th-century illustrations). The edition Goodreads links to first in its record (determined by number of reviews) is the Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland that the book description declares to be "illuminating." As summarized there, it supposedly shows this novel to be "...a much darker work [than Pride and Prejudice], which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse.'" Now, I haven't read that introduction myself; but I have read both the mentioned novels, the rest of Austen's corpus, and some factual material about the author; and I'm also familiar with the general milieu of modern academic literary critics, who tend to despise any values they don't share, and to assume that no intelligent person could hold them --if they appear to, it must be a pose. (An ironic assumption in Austen's case, given that one thing she despised was hypocrisy!) That background leads me to suspect that readers would be better advised to trust their own perceptions of Austen's messages, and take introductions like Sutherland's with the proverbial grain of salt (or a truckload of salt blocks).

While I wouldn't characterize this novel as dark, however, I would say that, compared to other Austen novels, it tends to exude a sense of even deeper maturity of judgment and realistic understanding of human possibilities. (Not then knowing the exact chronology of the novels, when I finished it I actually surmised that it might have been the author's last completed novel, and was rather surprised to see that it wasn't. I'm still inclined to see it as the crown of her craftsmanship, though Pride and Prejudice has a special place in my esteem as the first Austen novel I read.) She deals more frankly here with the subject of marital infidelity than she does elsewhere (Admiral Crawford, for instance, notoriously cheated on his late wife, and is criticized for it); and in her narrative voice, in one crucial place, she directly challenges the gender-based sexual double standard of her day. Though it's not the only one to feature a clergyman as an important character, this is also the novel that most explicitly endorses specifically Christian faith and conduct, and in several places. That's always an underlying assumption in Austen's world; but here it's expressed openly.

There's no moral discontinuity between this or any of the author's other novels, however. While she might have valued "tradition" and "stability" as much as most people in her time, she doesn't propagandize for them here, beyond the obvious fact that she realistically portrays a society that still had stability and preserved some traditions (and that modern readers are apt to notice that). But she very definitely presents a message that's supportive of "faithfulness" in marriage, of honesty and kindness in personal relationships, of valuing personal honor and duty more than self-gratification at others' expense, and of valuing love more than money. That she particularly values "retirement," here or elsewhere, is open to question. Like some other writers, she personally prefers rural over urban life; and Fanny certainly is retiring, shy, modest and self-effacing. (Being shy myself, I could relate to her easily!) But I don't pick up a message that Fanny's ultra-shyness is a role model here, it's just a trait she has. She is, though, stronger inside than others might think. I disagreed with one reviewer who considered her impossibly good; but she is a woman who has an innate nobility of character which can, in that sense, serve as a realistic and constructive role model. (I also disagreed that the characters here are "cardboard;" I found them, in fact, to be highly life-like and nuanced, with realistic strengths, foibles, and dynamic possibilities.)

In conclusion, I have to say, if I could ever meet any author, through the medium of time travel, and spend some time in serious conversation, the author I'd unhesitatingly pick would be Austen! ...more

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Jun 10, 2011 Crystal rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

Ahhh... Jane and her heroines... Fanny is no Elizabeth Bennett but she will most certainly do for her moral fortitude and her devotion to true integrity.

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Mar 28, 2023 Amber rated it it was amazing

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May 25, 2015 Danielle King added it · review of another edition

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