Book Review - Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Published by: Doubleday
Publication Date: 1814
Format: Hardcover, 496 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
Fanny Price is a burden to her poor and ever expanding family. Her two maternal aunts decide to help their disadvantageously married sister by taking Fanny in at Mansfield Park, separating the young girl from the only family she has ever known and her beloved brother William. She is to be raised with her four cousins, Tom, Edmund, Maria, and Julia. Given all the advantages they have but never once allowed by her aunt, Mrs. Norris, to ever think herself their equal. She is a part of the family but always apart, not really one of them, but not even fitting in with the servants. She is truly alone. If it wasn't for the kindness of her cousin Edmund to that undersized ten year old, Fanny would have despaired. Instead she has grown up "knowing her place" and hopelessly in love with Edmund. A love she knows her family would never embrace. So she loves him in silence, not wanting to cause trouble. But the eldest, Tom, is causing trouble. He has racked up debts that require his father to sell the living of the local parsonage that was to be Edmund's and the Grants move in. This wouldn't have been a catastrophic event except for what happened next. Fanny's uncle and her cousins' father, Sir Thomas Bertam, was called away to Antigua, taking Tom with him. The power vacuum at Mansfield Park was filled by Mrs. Norris. She sees this time as coming into her own, she finds a wealthy dunderhead of a fiance for Maria, and encourages an intimacy with the parsonage, an intimacy which is far more interesting to the inhabitants of Mansfield Park when Mrs. Grant's two siblings, Henry and Mary Crawford, arrive. Mrs. Norris hopes to marry Henry to Julia and Mary, well Mary initially thinks only of Tom, until she begins to see what Fanny sees in Edmund. But the trouble caused with Henry and his ever roving eye, going from Julia to Maria to Fanny, will change Mansfield Park forever.
When I first read Mansfield Park I took a bizarre pride in being one of the few to actually love it more than Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. I thought anyone who didn't view it as Austen's best work was deluded and therefore not worth my time. I have often felt myself against the Austen mainstream. Bucking treads and going my own way and listening to my heart and not to academic discourse. Because if there's one thing I can be certain of it's that Jane Austen herself would despise many of the people who populate the higher ranks of her so-called "societies." What this book captures, more than any other, is the darker side of familial obligations. Fanny is slighted, imposed upon, nothing more than a tool to be of use to other people. Part of their lives without one of her own. An identity subsumed into theirs, nothing more than a dogsbody. She was basically sold into service. And yes, I will grudgingly admit that with Antigua there is an underscoring of slavery, the real slavery Austen was interested in here is adoption. And while she might have been telling the story about Fanny's adoption into her cousins' family, I think it was actually a thinly veiled reference to her own life. Jane's brother Edward was "presented" to his wealthy relatives Thomas and Catherine Knight, the same relatives who gave Jane's father the living at Steventon, when Edward was twelve and Jane was five. Edward became their legal heir and left Jane's family unit. How might this have effected young Jane? Could she have written Mansfield Park as a way to handle this trauma in her life? I personally think she did. Because while everything turned out alright for Fanny as it did for her brother Edward, one might say that Mansfield Park is about working though her issues. But I hope writing this book was cathartic. I know it was reading it.
Austen wrote what she knew, therefore in playing the tourist for her books we've covered a lot of places she went to. Yet this journey would be incomplete without the three most important places to her life; where she was born, where she lived, and where she died. Jane Austen was born in Steventon in Hampshire where her father served as rector. Many times when looking into the past it's about looking at where buildings used to be and that is sadly the case with the parsonage. Though the new parsonage which still stands was actually built by Jane's brother Edward some time after Jane's death. But the place of prime interest is the church, St. Nicholas's, where Jane went for twenty-six years of her life with her family to hear her father preach. A spire has been added since Austen’s lifetime, bearing a wind vane in the shape of a pen in her honor. Though that is probably small comfort to Jane who expected to live her entire life in this small community and instead ended up moving to the odious Bath when her father retired, making way for her brother James at the rectory. It must have been bittersweet to visit him in what was once her home. 
Though thankfully after time spent in Bath and various family homes Jane found her own home in Chawton where she resided for the last eight years of her life, which is now 
As for the sad conclusion to Jane's life... she was ill with what, we can not know for certain, but she was brought to Winchester by her sister and brother Henry for treatment. She died there on July 18th, 1817, at the age of 41 and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. She was much too young to die and could have given us so much more than just six novels. Thankfully Winchester Cathedral is a building she admired, because can you imagine how annoyed her ghost would be to be in a place she disliked? If she had died in Bath she'd be haunting the heck out of it! Her grave marker in the cathedral doesn't mention that she was a writer, so over the years through family and fans she now has a brass plaque and a memorial window. While in Winchester you can also see the house she died in on College Street, but I think that's a little morbid. Instead sit in quiet contemplation in the cathedral, look to her window and watch the light shine through. And perhaps think of Mr. Collins and have a good laugh because she, like Lizzy Bennet, was never one to take life too seriously. 
