Mansfield Park (Word Cloud Classics) - Softcover

Austen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1626869731 ISBN 13: 9781626869738

Publisher: Canterbury Classics, 2017

Synopsis

Social class, friendship, and morality meet in a tangled web that only love can unweave.

Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park, first published in 1814, tells the story of young Fanny Price, who is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, at the age of ten. As she grows up, she develops deep feelings for her cousin Edmund Bertram, the only person at Mansfield Park who shows her true kindness. When the Bertram family is thrown into scandal and disorder, Fanny and Edmund must overcome the chaos around them so they can come to terms with the affection that they have for one another. A classic story that deals with social structures, friendship, morality, and love, Mansfield Park is now available in a handsome Word Cloud Classics edition, making it a treasured addition to any reader's bookshelf.

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: Canterbury Classics
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1626869731
• ISBN 13: 9781626869738
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 520