What can one say about Jane Austen? There are so many Jane fans, groupies, common readers, blogger, vloggers, and academics that anything you say will be redundant. But I am popping in to laud Mansfield Park, which is my new favorite novel by Austen.
I have been acquainted with Jane Austen for years. When I was 14 I carried a Modern Library edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen everywhere one summer. I had no Regency England clothes, but I reinvented Elizabeth Bennet’s look in a prim smocked-and-embroidered dress worn over jeans with Dr. Scholl’s Exercise sandals. I wanted to live in Pride and Prejudice, and I would be Lizzie, not Lydia (closer to my age), but I was not thinking of the disadvantageous lack of indoor plumbing, running water, and electricity.
It is a pity the Modern Library printed Austen’s books in order, because I did not enjoy the first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice came as a great relief and I loved it. And then I discovered the pointedly satiric Emma, which trumped even Pride and Prejudice. By then I had graduated from Modern Library to the Norton.
Why Mansfield Park, you may ask?
I am fascinated by Austen’s delicate, serious portrait of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, particularly in the latter part of the novel. Having lived with her aunt, uncle, and cousins at Mansfield Park since she was 10, her visit home as an adult comes is a shock. Her parents are poor, which of course she knew but the household is noisy and chaotic, which she had forgotten. The house is dominated by her unruly brothers kicking and stampeding and her sisters fighting over a knife (a utensil, not a weapon), which belongs to Susan. Her mother cannot manage the housekeeping or her children, and sits in a state of exhaustion while the maid does what she wants when she wants: one doesn’t expect good meals or even tea at the appropriate time.
The Price family’s slovenliness has an effect on Fanny’s health. Fanny is so sensitive that she can barely stand the noise and the cramped rooms. The air of the town is stagnant and there is no place to walk. And then she is burdened by a visit from her unwanted suitor, Mr. Crawford, whom I found utterly charming and who even Fanny admits is courteous and tactful about her family. He has taken on doing good works at the cottages at his estate, and asks her advice. (Dorothea in Middlemarch might have liked him.) Fanny approves. But of course she does not love him.
Over the years, I have been disappointed by Fanny’s choice of lover. Witty Mr. Crawford seems to fall deeply in love with her, and I do believe in his reform, at least for a while. Fanny’s choice of lover, her cousin Edmund, who is openly mad about Miss Crawford, Mr. Crawford’s sister, confides in Fanny about his struggle to win her over. It could be a comedy, but it is not.
This reading, decades after my first reading (I shall not shock you with my age), I paid close attention to Fanny’s thoughts, wishes, and brilliant analyses of character. Mansfield Park is a very great novel, in the class of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.
What should you wear at Mansfield Park? You might want to wear a Regency gown, but is adequate to dress in cropped pants, a linen blouse, and sandals. Or perhaps vintage culottes and an asymmetrical t-shirt.
We need to design Jane Austen reading-wear!
I’m very fond of Northanger Abey. I read MP when I was 15 nd was mesmerized. When I got to the end, I was so moved by the statements about struggling, enduring, I turned back to the first page, and read it again. I didn’t think about other readers. Much later in life I saw it could be seen as a repressive novel, narrow and Fanny over pious But like my later doubts over other novels that originally riveted me, and I became estranged from (Rebecca), I’ve come back to my first sense of its meaning.
Yes, I often go back to my original readings, too. But this is the first time I have really enjoy Mansfield, and all because of Fanny. The Crawfords add liveliness and charm but by the end of the novel they have caused a veritable train wreck. Here’s to rereading novels! It was a different experience for me this time.
Also my favourite Austen. It doesn’t have the brilliance of Emma or the touching melancholy of Persuasion, but it somehow makes worthiness, non-glamour, appealing. There is real tension in Mansfield Park too, particularly when Henry Crawford pursues Fanny. Part of you wants him to succeed, because he has (temporarily) reformed, part wants her to resist. The scene where Sir Thomas adds his voice to Henry’s is genuinely uncomfortable to read.
Another Mansfield Park-ist!
A fascinating, sometimes even grim, book. It is a miracle that Fanny did not marry Henry Crawford, because I would have! Edmund is highly intelligent and sometimes witty, but how she could bear his enthusiasm for charming Miss Crawford? Fanny is a genius: she knows everyone’s character, and also sees the future. Definitely a wise, odd novel, unique among her Austen’s other books. And I agree that Sir Thomas’s pressure on Fanny is uncomfortable. Very difficult for her.