Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s third published novel, Mansfield Park, holds back on the comedy and concentrates on the dilemmas facing the individual in society. The novel’s heroine, Fanny Price, is a masterful portrait of complex and nuanced consciousness.

Mansfield Park (1814) was Jane Austen’s third novel to be published during her lifetime. Unlike its two predecessors, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park was not some earlier work which was dug out of the drawer and re-worked.

Mansfield Park came to Austen as an entirely new work, written up in one stretch and then promptly published. After turning her earlier novels Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility, and First Impressions into Pride and Prejudice, Austen had obviously hit her stride and found her confidence as a writer. She would quickly follow Mansfield Park with Emma (1815) and the posthumously published Persuasion (1818). An unfinished manuscript, Sanditon, was being worked on until Austen’s illness forced her to put it aside.

Mansfield Park makes for quite a departure from Austen’s first two published works. While there are still notes of humour, the tone is more sombre, thoughtful and introspective. The whole novel is pretty much seen through the perceptive and sensitive eyes of Fanny Price, who at the age of ten leaves her financially struggling family to move in with her rich relations, the Bertrams (Lady Bertram is her mother’s sister, wife of the wealthy Sir Thomas Bertram).

At the illustrious Mansfield Park, Fanny meets her cousins Maria, Julia, the wayward Tom and the kindly Edmund. Her position as a poor relative is unhappily reinforced by these well off cousins; to them she barely exists as a person in her own right. To add to Fanny’s woes, she is shy and sensitive. Her only position in the family can be that of a fringe dweller, closely observing the conduct of her relatives, yet holding her peace.

Fanny is further marginalised from Mansfield Park society when two more young people visit the Bertram family, the worldly yet selfish Mary and Henry Crawford. This brother and sister team are like two horrors out of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Mary is vain, cruel, superficial, and amoral, while her brother Henry flirts with the sisters Maria and Julia Bertram, sowing a destructive jealousy between them.

During the romantic shenanigans and game-playing that goes on between the Crawfords and the Bertrams (Mary Crawford toys with the idea of marrying Edmund Bertram), Fanny Price is an often ignored bystander. Having no money or social position, merely tolerated as a favour to the Price family who cannot really afford to look after her, Fanny moves about this group almost as a shadow. In the early parts of the novel, she is thoughtlessly left by herself while her cousins and the Crawfords go off on their flirtatious walks through various convoluted garden paths. But there is one advantage this gives her (and the novel, for that matter), as it puts before Fanny a plain view of all the action. She sees with a clear eye who is manipulating whom, who cannot be trusted and who is conducting themselves in an improper or unbecoming way. For a large part of the novel Fanny quietly observes from this almost invisible vantage point the stratagems and maneuverings, the characters and personalities, of Mansfield Park society.

Jane Austen’s great achievement in the novel is the three dimensional portrait of Fanny; her complex and finely nuanced inner life, so authentic and true to life, absorbs the reader absolutely. Indeed, the reader inhabits and lives Fanny’s very consciousness. Every drama and event that unfolds in the novel reverberates deeply through this exquisitely sensitive character, making us almost feel Fanny’s every breath. In the scenes where she is being heavily prevailed upon to perform what she thinks is not right, like when her Bertram cousins and the Crawfords want to put on a rather inappropriate play, the reader palpably feels what’s its like to be put under severe peer group pressure.

Of course Jane Austen’s heroines always change and discover their deeper selves during the progress of her novels. Fanny grows to young adulthood, and through many trials learns more about herself and the world about her. Moreover, the somewhat complacent and cocooned world of Mansfield Park finally wakes up to learn what a prize they have in Fanny. Her high moral standards, irreproachable conduct and good company come to be indispensable to all at Mansfield Park. Fanny starts her life at Mansfield Park a complete outsider, with no friends and regarded as little more than a piece of the furniture, yet by the novel’s end she is an integral part of that society.

This third novel by Jane Austen has less plot, less drama and humour, than its two predecessors, but instead plumbs its psychological territory to a greater depth, providing a complex analysis of character, motive and human error. To walk and think with Fanny Price through the pages of Mansfield Park, as she grapples with the difficult challenges of her small society, is to feel one’s own experiences of life reflected back through the pen of this extraordinarily delicate and perceptive writer.

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0141439808