Description

The Mansfield Park of the title, a magnificent, idyllic estate which is home to the wealthy Bertram family, stands as a bastion of English tradition and stability. The novels heroine, Fanny Price, is a poor relation living with the Bertrams, acutely conscious of her inferior status and yet daring to love their son Edmundbut from afar. However, with five marriageable young people on the premises, the peace at Mansfield cannot last. Courtships, entertainments and intrigues throw the place into turmoil, and Fanny finds herself unwillingly competing with a dazzlingly witty and lovely rival. As critic Margaret Drabble has pointed out, the house becomes full of the energies of discordsibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion, and vanity, and the novel becomes ever more engrossing as it builds to Mansfields final scandal and, finally, a satisfying conclusion. Unique in its moral design and brilliant interplay of the forces of tradition and change, Mansfield Park was the first novel of Jane Austens maturity, and the first in which the author turned her unerring eye on the concerns of English society at a time of great upheaval.