Mrs Rushworth - Hardcover

Gordon, Victor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0233983589 ISBN 13: 9780233983585

Publisher: Andre Deutsch, 1989

Synopsis

If Mr Rushworth had been more manly, or Mr Crawford less so, Mrs Rushworth (formerly Miss Bertram of Mansfield Park) would not have become a social outcast, and the reader would have been deprived of one of the most entertaining sequels in English fiction. Victor Gordon's interest and sympathy lie not with Fanny Price, that 'insipid embodiment of all the deadly virtues', but with Maria Rushworth - lovely, impulsive, warm-blooded; damned by society as much for leaving a rich husband as for taking a lover. In the opening pages, Maria and Aunt Norris, whose self-interested championship proves even more destructive than the fashionable world's proscription, are taking up residence in the decent obscurity of Leamington Spa. Their respectable anonymity is shattered by the appearance at the circulating library of "Mansfield Park" - with its disclosure of Maria's scandalous past. What happens when Maria decides to make a new life in the United States, meets a charming but impecunious young artist and picks up the theatrical threads so crassly severed by her authoritarian father, forms the stuff of this wonderfully witty and caustic tale. Full of ingenuity and surprise, the book requires no prior familiarity with Mansfield Park or its denizens. It will, however, delight - or infuriate - all Jane Austen lovers and give dangerously heretical insights to Eng. Lit. examinees past, present and future. Above all, it is necessary reading for anyone who has been betrayed, by family, friends or lover, in the name of morality... "Mrs Rushworth" may be set in the post-Waterloo world, but the flexible principles and double standards it exposes with such irony are just as prevalent today.

About this edition

• Publisher: Andre Deutsch
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0233983589
• ISBN 13: 9780233983585
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 331