Mansfield Park- a review
I have only ever read Mansfield Park twice. The second time was over the past weekend. Needless to say, I’ve revised my opinion of it.
First, Mansfield Park is not a romance. Once you read it with that understanding, the fact that it’s very unromantic is less of a problem. Austen is best when she writes about families and society. I learned more about Regency era life and times and culture from Mansfield Park than any of her other books, although Emma is a close second. She delineates how people live, eat, and work, what they buy, how they shop, how they talk with each other. MP is also really good at showing us working class people, especially in the extended sequence when Fanny goes to visit her family in Portsmouth.
By the way, Austen really liked sailors. I don’t mean that in a nudge nudge wink wink kind of way at all, but first Captain Wentworth and now William Price really make it clear she had a ton of respect and admiration for men who went to sea. I wonder if she ever dreamed of it herself, the way girls do, before their dreams of adventure are crushed under the merciless heel of society.
Secondly, MP is really modern. It’s densely written because that’s Austen’s style, but it’s eminently readable and the cadence and flow are mostly not archaic. There’s a lot of modern usage as well; my favorite is when Mrs. Norris is said to be “spunging” off a neighbor.
Third: Anyone who thinks Jane Austen led a sheltered life can’t possibly think so after reading Mansfield Park. Holy cow, there’s shocking stuff. The Crawford’s uncle who decides to install his mistress into his house. When Henry runs off with Maria. The underlying flirtation between Henry and Maria. All of this stuff just swirls around MP and it’s all very sophisticated and, yes, modern. Austen is against this behavior, through her proxies Fanny and Edmund, but she is not afraid of writing about it.
One of the reasons MP is not as well liked (I suspect) is not just because Fanny’s a wimp and Edmund is a prig, but because for most of the book Mary and Henry Crawford are not that bad. They are selfish jerks but they aren’t hugely selfish jerks. Henry even starts to get better toward the end. They just weren’t villainous enough. So when it comes to Fanny and Edmund’s conflict with them, I had a hard time working up the same outrage. Yes, Mary didn’t want to marry a parson. Yes, Henry led Maria on and then at the end he ruins her, but since for most of the book Edmund figures he can forgive Mary for being calculating about money and marriage, I just couldn’t see why they were supposed to be so bad.
It isn’t until Henry runs off with Maria, and Julia, in a panic, elopes with Yates (which was the funniest part of the book, actually, that she was so afraid her father would never let her go back to London that she elopes) that we see their true colors. But up until that point, the Crawfords are just selfish, unthinking, charming rich people. I kept thinking, “but they aren’t that bad.”
And that, I suspect, was Austen’s point. I bet her contemporary readers didn’t much like MP either. No one likes being preached to.
I’m glad I gave it another chance. Certainly it allowed me to see how bad the most recent BBC adaptation was. I knew it was bad, but boy. Talk about missing the point.
I am also more convinced that Louisa May Alcott borrowed, consciously or not, something of MP for An Old-Fashioned Girl. That will have to be my next read, just to see if I am right.


