Jane Austen - Mansfield Park

 

I have a nice story about Mansfield Park. We had a 2-day stopover in Brighton to see Stewart Lee, and on one of the days, while walking back to our Airbnb, we passed by a box of free things outside a neighbour's house. Among all the kitchen utensils and crockery and Bill Bryson books was a battered copy of Mansfield Park. Wahey!

At first I was quite put off by the scholarly underlined bits thanks to the book's previous owner. But the writing was just too good. I was soon hooked.

Mansfield Park is the first Jane Austen book I finished reading. I enjoyed it a lot - not so much for the plot but for Austen's characterisation and dialogue. As with Shirley the plot is a bit "meh":

Fanny, a girl from a "poor and numerous" family, is sent to Mansfield Park to live with her much wealthier aunt and uncle, who have children of their own. As she grows up she's constantly made to feel inferior to their family; of the 4 children, only Edmund (the younger son) is nice to her. 

Well, Fanny grows up and is in love with Edmund, predictably. Meanwhile, 2 dashing London siblings - Henry and Mary Crawford - come to the country and mess everything up in Mansfield Park. Fanny's female cousins compete for Henry's attentions, Edmund falls in love with Mary, and then Henry appears to fall for Fanny, to her dismay.

In the end Henry succumbs to temptation and has an indiscreet affair with one of Fanny's foster sisters - who is now married!!! - bringing shame and ruin upon the family. Then all of a sudden Edmund realises Fanny is quite pretty after all and decides to marry her.

The love quadrangle is really but a vehicle for her naughty impersonations of people that you just KNOW are based on real-life equivalents. The miserly, self aggrandising aunt! The phlegmatic, self-absorbed mum! The bitchy Londoner who laughs at country bumpkins, and her fuccboi brother!

No one in the book actually expresses what they feel or think - but Jane Austen's so skilled she doesn't need to. As a reader you just imagine and empathise automatically. Nor does Austen use the pathetic fallacy so often found in the gothic novels that were popular during her time. (I can't wait to read Northanger Abbey, her satire of gothic novels!)

By pure coincidence I finished reading Mansfield Park the day before we went to Bath and checked out the Jane Austen Centre. It's worth noting that Austen - being an unmarried woman with no power - did not CHOOSE to live in Bath; she only did because she was invited by relatives. Yet she made the best of things, lapping up Bath society and immortalising it in her books. What an amazing woman.