Mansfield Park (Oneworld Classics) - Softcover

Austen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847491367 ISBN 13: 9781847491367

Publisher: Oneworld Classics, 2010

Synopsis

Published in 1814, this nuanced examination of the social hierarchy of Jane Austen’s day contains more than enough wit, charm, and human drama to enchant readers of any era Born into a poor family, Fanny Price is raised amid the daunting splendor of Mansfield Park by her rich uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. Treated as an inferior by most of the family, Fanny forms a close attachment to her cousin Edmund, the only person to show her kindness. With the departure of her uncle to the West Indies and the arrival from London of the fashionable Henry and Mary Crawford, flirtation and romantic intrigue abound. As Fanny becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of her companions, she finds herself isolated and forced to face the conflict between her sense of integrity and social expectation. This edition includes pictures and an extensive section about the author's life and works.

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: Oneworld Classics
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1847491367
• ISBN 13: 9781847491367
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448