Mansfield Park (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
by Jane Austen
List Price:
Our Price: $11.00
You Save: $11.00 (50%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $7.98 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Jane AustenEdition: Hardcover
Published: 1992-06-02
ISBN: 0679412697
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Book Reviews of Mansfield Park (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
Book Review: Complex and Thought-Provoking
Summary: 5 Stars
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 older, becomes both friend and counselor to her. The monotony of Mansfield Park is upset when brother and sister, Henry and Mary Crawford, visit their sister at the parsonage of Mansfield. Henry Crawford toys with the affections of Fanny's cousins, Maria and Julia, while Mary Crawford earnestly seeks the affections of Edmund. Fanny quietly observes all.
Mansfield Park is a complex and sometimes disturbing novel, and its conclusion has a tendency to feel less than satisfactory. Jane Austen contrasts the very moral Fanny Price and her cousin Edmund Bertram with the very charming but amoral Mary Crawford and her brother Henry Crawford. While doing this, Jane Austen never actually tells her readers what to think about her characters. She presents their thoughts, words, and actions in an almost unbiased manner and leaves judgment up to the reader. The novel is definitely food for thought, and every time I read it, I find myself feeling differently about both it and its characters than I did the time before. I appreciate both the storyline and its thought-provoking complexity.
The Oxford Illustrated edition of Mansfield Park contains a copy of the play Lovers' Vows referred to in the novel, which is such a treat. After reading both the novel and the play, one cannot help but be struck by the parallels between the two. I recommend this edition to anyone curious about the controversial play in the novel.
Summary of Mansfield Park (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
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
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Introduction by Peter Conrad
Begun in 1811 at the height of Jane Austen's writing powers and published in 1814, Mansfield Park marks a conscious break from the tone of her first three novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, the last of which Austen came to see as "rather too light." Fanny Price is unlike any of Austen's previous heroines, a girl from a poor family brought up in a splendid country house and possessed of a vast reserve of moral fortitude and imperturbability. She is very different from Elizabeth Bennet, but is the product of the same inspired imagination.
19th Century Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in The Essential Jane Austen
Sense & Sensibility (Special Edition)Sony; Release date: 1999-08-24; DVD
Best price: $5.00
Price in other shops:
PersuasionSony; Release date: 2000-02-01; DVD
Best price: $8.15
Price in other shops:
Pride and Prejudice - The Special Edition (A&E, 1996)A&E; Release date: 2001-09-25; DVD
Best price: $19.13
Price in other shops:
Jane Austen's Lettersby Jane Austen
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1997-04-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.08
Price in other shops:
Jane Austen: A Lifeby Claire Tomalin
Vintage; Published: 1999-04-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.90
Price in other shops:
Sanditon and Other Stories (Everyman's Library)by Jane Austen
Everyman's Library; Published: 1996-04-16; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.16
Price in other shops:
Northanger Abbey (Everyman's Library (Cloth))by Jane Austen
Everyman's Library; Published: 1992-11-03; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.94
Price in other shops:
Emma (Everyman's Library (Cloth))by Jane Austen
Everyman's Library; Published: 1991-11-26; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $11.00
Price in other shops:
Sense and Sensibility (Everyman's Library)by Jane Austen
Everyman's Library; Published: 1992-03-10; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $10.14
Price in other shops:
Mansfield Park (Everyman's Library (Cloth))by Jane Austen
Everyman's Library; Published: 1992-06-02; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.11
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
Sanditon and Other Stories (Everyman's Library)by Jane Austen
Everyman's Library; Published: 1996-04-16; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.16
Price in other shops:
Persuasion (Penguin Classics)by Jane Austen
Penguin Classics; Published: 2003-04-29; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.60
Price in other shops:
Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics)by Jane Austen
Penguin Classics; Published: 2003-04-29; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.14
Price in other shops:
Sense and Sensibility (Norton Critical Editions)by Jane Austen
W. W. Norton; Published: 2001-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.37
Price in other shops:
Persuasion (Norton Critical Editions)by Jane Austen
W. W. Norton; Published: 2000-10-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops:
Sense and Sensibility (Dover Thrift Editions)by Jane Austen
Dover Publications; Published: 1995-12-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.88
Price in other shops:
Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics)by Jane Austen
Bantam Classics; Published: 1983-12-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.27
Price in other shops:
Persuasion (Tor Classics)by Jane Austen
Tor Classics; Published: 1999-10-15; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.20
Price in other shops:
Emma (Penguin Classics)by Jane Austen
Penguin Classics; Published: 2003-05-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.32
Price in other shops:
Northanger Abbey (Modern Library Classics)by Jane Austen
Modern Library; Published: 2002-01-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.29
Price in other shops: