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Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen is her most ambitious and most controversial novel — the most ethically serious and the most divided from her usual comedic tone. Fanny Price is a poor relation of the Bertram family who is taken to live at Mansfield Park at age ten and who grows up on the margins of the household, loved by only one person (her cousin Edmund Bertram, whom she loves in return) and generally ignored or looked down on by everyone else. The arrival of the attractive Crawford siblings — Henry and Mary — disrupts the moral equilibrium of the household: the Bertram daughters lose their heads, Fanny falls into greater danger, and Edmund is attracted to Mary Crawford despite her frivolous values. Fanny alone maintains moral clarity throughout the novel, refuses the admiring Henry Crawford's proposal of marriage, and is vindicated when the Crawford siblings reveal their true characters in the novel's denouement. The novel is controversial because Fanny is so passive and so earnestly moral that many readers find her difficult to love, and because the novel's ending — in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished in a way that seems more Victorian than Austenian — strikes many readers as morally schematic.
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Mansfield Park (1814)
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Mansfield Park
Jane Austen·1814
Mansfield Park — Frequently Asked Questions
Why do many readers find Mansfield Park the most difficult Austen novel?
Several reasons: Fanny Price is passive, anxious, easily exhausted, and without the quick wit that makes Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot immediately attractive to readers. Her moral seriousness — she is the only character who consistently sees clearly — can read as priggishness, and her patience in the face of treatment that makes most readers want to shake the Bertrams reads as passivity. The novel's values (ordination, duty, the stability of the English country house) are more explicitly conservative than Austen's other novels, and the treatment of the theatrical episode (in which the young people's decision to stage a play while Sir Thomas is away in Antigua is treated as a serious moral lapse) has struck many readers as disproportionate.
What is the significance of Sir Thomas Bertram's time in Antigua?
Sir Thomas goes to Antigua to manage his plantations — which implies slave-owning. The only explicit reference to this in the novel is Fanny's question to Edmund about whether she had asked Sir Thomas about the slave trade, to which Edmund replies 'dead silence.' The passage has generated enormous critical attention: Edward Said's reading of Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism (1993) argues that the novel's moral universe is built on the wealth produced by slavery, and that Austen's silences are complicit in what they don't say. Others argue that Fanny's question implies Austen's awareness and possible critique. The debate about this passage has made Mansfield Park the most politically discussed of Austen's novels.
Is Fanny Price meant to be a Christian saint?
There is a long tradition of reading Fanny as a figure of Christian virtue — patient, forgiving, incapable of malice or deception, and vindicated eventually by Providence. This reading has support in the text: the novel's values are explicitly Christian in a way that Austen's other novels' values are not, and Fanny's eventual triumph is presented as a moral vindication rather than merely a social one. But other readers resist this reading, finding Fanny more interesting as a psychological study of someone damaged by childhood neglect — her passivity, her anxiety, her inability to assert herself even in her own interest are the responses of a traumatized child, not of a saint.
How does Mansfield Park end?
Henry Crawford, who has been persistently courting Fanny, runs off with Maria Bertram (Sir Thomas's daughter, who had married Mr. Rushworth but whose passion for Crawford was never extinguished). Mary Crawford, whom Edmund had intended to marry, reveals in a letter that she finds the scandal inconvenient rather than morally serious — which definitively breaks Edmund's attachment. Edmund turns to Fanny, who has always loved him; they eventually marry. The ending is unusually brisk and condensed for Austen — she almost rushes through the resolutions, as if impatient to be done with the novel's elaborate moral architecture.
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