Mansfield Park (Modern Library Classics)
by Jane Austen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jane AustenIntroduction: Carol Shields
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-10-09
ISBN: 0375757813
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Modern Library
Book Reviews of Mansfield Park (Modern Library Classics)
Book Review: Strong Character is the Greatest Strength of All
Summary: 5 Stars
*Mansfield Park* is somewhat quixotic. It is at the same time one of my favorite, and one of my least favorite, books of all time. It is a beautifully-written tale of love, kindness, and strength of character, rising above adversity and winning the day for the heroine. It is also a tale of unspeakable emotional abuse of the heroine by nearly everyone else for some half of the book, and most others for nearly the entire story.
The book begins with the tale of three sisters who had a falling-out. Two of them married well enough that the one after her husband's death was still upper-middle class, while the other was quite wealthy. The third sister married a lower-class man whose inability to provide much economically for his new wife, lead to a furious disagreement that never quite heals. Eventually, the poorer sister, Mrs. Price, after having a large number of children, appealed to her sisters desperately for help.
The help came in the form of an offer to take one of the daughters into the family of the wealthier sister as a ward. While this may seem ideal to most folks to be removed for near-poverty to opulence, it had a serious drawback for the young girl named Fanny Price. She spent her days either being ignored by most of her relations, or outright abused by others. Particularly, the widowed sister was a bitter woman who clearly hated her other sister still, for her treatment of Fanny is horrendous.
And trust me, I really *do* mean *horrendous*. I found myself shocked and angered as I read, though I am aware that these are just literary characters. Shocked and outraged because I know this almost certainly happened in real life to these children. What the wealthy clan, the Bertrams, did for Fanny seems to have been common practice at the time, as probably was the abuse in all too many situations.
This is the strength and weakness both of the novel. Jane Austen takes her same skill at wit and satire that she employed to write the bantering romance of Darcy and Lizzie in *Pride and Prejudice*, and uses it to tell a story of triumph over incredible adversity. I found myself simultaneously drawn into the narrative and wanting to put the book down because of how vivid the world of young Fanny was, with all of it's attendant triumphs and horrors, pleasures and abuses.
There seems to be a rather large, and quite sickeningly stunning to me, number of people who don't like the character of Fanny, because of her perceived "weakness". They seem to view the fact that Fanny is not assertive and takes the abuse as evidence of her unlikable "wimpiness". To be sure, they have *might* have a point, but for the fact that they obviously had not paid attention to the overall narrative of the story.
What I mean by this is that it was not just Fanny's more gentle nature that lead to her lack of assertiveness, but her treatment at the hands of her relations, especially the complete monster of an aunt that she had in the abusive Mrs. Norris. She was a girl who knew and was constantly told her place, and she was certainly too scared to cross that line in the sand. She pretty much did what she was told to do, including being treated like the servant of her aunts and daughters, and accepted being told how worthless she was.
Despite all of this, however, she had the strength of character to refuse to do anything that may have compromised her principles. She had a clearly developed worldview and sense of right and wrong. This enabled her to make the correct decisions while most of her family made horrible decisions that caused much harm. In the end, Fanny became the apple of her wealthy uncle (Sir Thomas Bertram) and aunt's eye. As well she was the apple of the eye all along of her future husband.
For those who wonder, yes I'm being vague. Given the status of the story as a novel of romance and manners, too much more detail may literally give the entire plot away from the start, which I do not wish to do. I do wish to say what is good in this story. And what is bad.
To be honest, there is hardly anything bad to be told. The book is hard to read for the sorrow and abuse of the heroine, but that is part of the plot that weaves together a story of ultimate triumph over adversity. The one and only drawback that I can put to the plot is how the heroine has a long tale of tumult and adversity with most of the novel's length dedicated to that, but only a few pages dedicated to her triumph and happiness. Do not get me wrong, I am happy about the ending and it did not disappoint. It was truly and deeply satisfying. I just would have liked a longer ending with more happiness explored. It would have been even *more* satisfying.
Nevertheless, the story is a compelling novel that teaches the reader an important lesson. You see, outside strength does not matter as much as inner character. Give the most fearless man or woman who lack a moral core (which I believe they can only obtain if they trust in the Lord Jesus Christ) enough time, and they *will* cause far, *far* more problems than the less stellar (from the outside) acting or appearing man or woman who have strong moral convictions. Me? I trust those of strong character more. For strong character really is the greatest strength of all.
Read this book, even if you have to occasionally put it down because of the intense content, as I had to do. You will not regret it. Highly Recommended.
Summary of Mansfield Park (Modern Library Classics)
Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations, Fanny is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, world. But Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the reader alike.In her Introduction, Carol Shields writes, [Mansfield Park's] overriding theme is difficult to isolate, since the novel is about everything it touches upon: nurturing, steadfastness, belonging and not belonging, about fine gradations of moral persuasion, about human noise and silence, and about action and stillness.
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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