Mansfield Park (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Austen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099589281 ISBN 13: 9780099589280

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2014

Synopsis

"The most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal."  —Virginia Woolf

Fanny Price's rich relatives offer her a place in their home so that she can be properly brought up. However, Fanny's childhood is a lonely one as she is never allowed to forget her place. Her only ally is her cousin Edmund. When her cousins befriend two glamorous new young people who have arrived in the area, Henry and Mary Crawford, Edmund starts to grow close to Mary and Fanny finds herself dealing with feelings she has never experienced before.

About this title

Review

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 Description

In recent years, Mansfield Park has come to be regarded as Austen's most controversial novel. It was published in two editions in her lifetime and here the differences between the first edition and the second, including some important amendments made by Jane Austen herself, are clearly noted on the page. The volume provides comprehensive notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual appa ratus. This edition is indispensable for all serious scholars and readers of Austen.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0099589281
• ISBN 13: 9780099589280
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576