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Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.

"'Is she queer?--Is she prudish?' These are not quotations from contenders in the brouhaha over Jane Austen's sexuality. They are questions the rakish Henry Crawford in 'Mansfield Park' asks as he wonders about the nerdiest of all heroines, Fanny Price. The erotic charm that makes other women in that novel yield one after another to Henry's desire fails to make a dent on this mousy and withdrawn girl...Henry Crawford's sense that Fanny is either queer or prudish also describes two contending traditions of Austenian reception that have prevailed since the mid-19th century...Those adhering to the elegaic tradition...believe Austen gives us a reassuringly orthodox world...where...the desires of gentlemen and ladies for each other are obviously complementary, mutually fulfilling, and above all inevitable...[In] another, anti-normative tradition...Austen has been suspected of sexual abnormality for a good long time..."

Claudia Johnson, London Review of Books, 10/05/1995

"What is the matter with Fanny Price, shadow heroine of Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'? Why is she so wimpy, nervous, passive, lacking in spirit, so relentlessly correct, so given--when she is invited--to little puffs of sanctimony, and why despite these qualities does she end up the respected mistress of the Bertram family and of their worthy country seat, Mansfield Park?...Not one of [Austen's other] heroines...has begun life as radically disentitled as Fanny Price of Portsmouth, and in the reading and understanding of her character we can bring forward some of our contemporary psychological insights....[O]nce again, Austen has read all the signs and correctly apportioned the rewards."

Vladimir Nabokov, 1980

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