A story of a shy, quiet heroine, Mansfield Park is a calm book full of patient endurance contrasted with shortsighted selfishness.
By my estimate, the book is around the length of Hard Times, longer than say Stepping Heavenward, and a little shorter than Little Women. It ranks with Jane Austen’s longer works.
Mansfield Park has a plot line that relies on some pretty complicated relationships. The story is not told in an inappropriate way, but the implications of the foreshadowing would be likely to go over a younger reader’s head; besides, the book has virtually no exciting scenes. I doubt a reader younger than 15+ would enjoy it.
Find my brief recap at the bottom, or read straight through for a deeper look at the book!
The Plot [spoiler alert!]
Mansfield Park’s main character, Fanny Price, is a shy, delicate girl who moves at a young age from her parents’ poor, inelegant home to an aunt and uncle’s wealthy mansion, Mansfield Park. From one angle, the book is about her finding her place in her new home. She grows up with her four cousins—Tom, Edmund, Maria, and Julia. Tom, much older than her, either laughs at her or ignores her; Maria and Julia are disposed to consider her harmless, but quite below them, and only Edmund treats Fanny with any decent consideration. But that’s enough for Fanny, who, being humble, does not think herself entitled to any great privilege among her wealthy relatives.
Fanny’s uncle, Sir William, is a grave, serious father, well-meaning but having difficulty in really knowing and relating to his children—or his niece either, for that matter. Her aunt is an indolent, easy-tempered woman. Maria and Julia grow up with another aunt, Aunt Norris, as the strongest influence on their characters.
Aunt Norris provides most of the humor of Mansfield Park; but not in an intentional way. She considers herself the most unselfish and self-sacrificing person on the planet, and does not fail to point that out at every favorable opportunity. It’s funny, but what a pain she would have been to live with!
With that bit of background, here’s the plot.
Shortly after Maria’s engagement to a respectable, but not very bright young man by the name of Mr. Rushworth, Mr. and Miss Crawford come to stay with their married half-sister Mrs. Grant. The “young people” soon become intimate; Mr. Crawford finds Maria and Julia both amusing, while Miss Crawford considers taking advantage of her chance at catching Tom Bertram and however many thousands of pounds he is to inherit. But Tom goes away for a brief pleasure trip, and by the time he returns, Miss Crawford is rather nettled to find that even his inheritance can’t outweigh the preference she’s starting to feel for his younger brother Edmund. This does not bother Tom in the least; he had no particular liking for Miss Crawford and just wants to have a good time. He’s brought a friend of his along with him, and the two of them concoct a plan to amuse themselves by getting up a play between his family and the Crawfords.
The idea of a private theatrical finds no favor with Edmund, who knows that Sir William (off in the West Indies or somewhere on business) would disapprove. He does his best to dissuade his siblings, but can do nothing against their stubbornness. And then, when Mary Crawford agrees to act, he finds he has a bit of a conflict of interest. Finally, when Tom proposes calling in yet another acquaintance to complete the cast (since Edmund refuses to act), Edmund takes council with Fanny. Or rather, he comes to her hoping for a rubber stamp on the determination he’s all but already taken; he will act, in the hopes of keeping it as private as possible so as little harm as possible is done.
Fanny is not in a position to say much, I grant, but it seems to me that if she were a little bolder she could have pointed out a few things, such as not doing wrong yourself on the off chance that you might be able to help keeping other people from doing more wrong than they would without you. But, bold is hardly a good descriptive word for Fanny Price.
Edmund and Mary Crawford are acting together, and Mr. Crawford has made the ill-considered choice (out of pure idle mischief) of deciding to act with Maria. That puts Julia into a long bad mood; but at least, Julia is smart enough to see how wrong it is of Mr. Crawford, and gets over her liking for him promptly enough. Mr. Rushworth also, though not bright enough to notice everything, is severely disgruntled. Tom and his friend keep pushing farther and farther with their plans for scenery and a theater platform and so forth, ignoring the fact that they’re spending Sir William’s money and messing up Sir William’s house in a way that he would entirely disapprove. Fanny, sensitive and absolutely without influence to improve the situation, sees it all with pain.
Then, unexpectedly, Sir William comes home. He is horrified to see what his children have been doing in his absence, but controls himself, puts a prompt stop to their antics, and is ready to forgive them. Edmund, the least guilty, naturally feels his father’s displeasure more keenly than the others, who just shrug it off.
Meanwhile Mr. Crawford leaves, to Maria’s bitter disappointment. She had expected him to propose to her and was perfectly ready to toss Mr. Rushworth over for him; but seeing that he clearly has no such intention, she resolves to go ahead and marry Mr. Rushworth.
Dear me! I don’t think I’m even halfway through the plotline; but it really is hard to condense. Let’s see if we can’t do better with the next half.
Edmund is still very unsure of Mary—no wonder, because Mary herself is quite undecided. Her inclination is certainly in favor of Edmund, but he has so very little money—! Fanny, caught between the two, is quite miserable; not the less miserable because Mary is friendly towards her.
Maria being off and married to Mr. Rushworth, Julia goes for a long visit; and then Mr. Crawford returns to his sister and casts about him for a source of amusement. It strikes him that Fanny Price is a pretty girl, and a likeable one, and moreover one who does not particularly like him. Between a sense of pique and genuine admiration, he decides he’ll try to rouse Fanny up a little and see if he can’t get her to fall in love with him.
It’s uphill work, certainly. Fanny not only dislikes Mr. Crawford, she thinks (and rightly) that he is positively unprincipled. To crown all that, she loves Edmund. But Mr. Crawford sees only the dislike, and is determined to overcome it. Indeed, he finds himself unexpectedly in love, and willing to go the whole hog. He even talks to Sir William and gets his consent and support—and here Fanny is tongue-tied, for anything she could say to explain her real reason for disliking Mr. Crawford would reflect horribly on Maria. Edmund supports Fanny’s decision out of solidarity, but thinks it would be a good match for her and hopes she will give Mr. Crawford a chance.
About this time Fanny, for a variety of reasons, takes a first trip back home to visit her parents and multitude of siblings. Sir William sagely reflects on the higher estimation for Mr. Crawford which a sight of her family’s poverty is likely to do her—and he is quite right as far as that goes. Mr. Crawford’s company is much more agreeable when he comes to take her for an outing from her parents’ small, noisy house in Portsmouth than when he intrudes on a quiet evening with Edmund at Mansfield Park.
But the dénouement is nearing; Mr. Crawford, like a moth, flies too near the candle—Maria. The two run away, sparking a horrible scandal; Edmund hears Miss Crawford speak of it as mere folly, rather than sin; his disillusionment is complete; Tom becomes sick, and in short the Bertram family is in a state of dire confusion and Fanny’s presence becomes extremely desirable—though no one can be more eager for her return than she herself, thoroughly tired out by the poverty and worse, the vulgarity of her old home.
From here things wind down fairly quickly. Sir William admits Fanny’s wisdom in rejecting Mr. Crawford, Edmund gradually talks himself out of his attachment to Miss Crawford, and after an unspecified period of time, the outcome that’s been obvious from the beginning takes place—and Fanny and Edmund live happily ever after.
As a plot line, I found it only suspenseful in the how, not the where. Where things were going was perfectly obvious; how they would get there was a matter for curiosity. Much of the book is dedicated to developing Fanny’s character and her inner life—what she felt, thought, and did in reaction to the actions of the other characters. So it seems to me that you’ll only like the book as well as you like the heroine.
I freely admit that I’m prejudiced against her from the word Fanny. I do not like the name. (Though I must make two exceptions: Fanny Dorrit and Fanny Thornton. The name weirdly fit those two, and they were both hilariously enjoyable characters, in the BBC series at least—to a lesser extent, in their respective books; Little Dorrit and North and South.) But in general, the name Fanny makes a girl sound so… languid, and—and when you combine that with Fanny Price’s retiring, quiet, shy, not at all spirited sort of personality, you get a character that I cannot wholeheartedly enjoy. I rather like her; she’s got some admirable qualities, and so forth—but no spirit, no vivacity, no humor. Perhaps that was part of the point—the character not so immediately likeable is the one who has the real tenacity and solidity to achieve happiness in the end. In my defense, however, I didn’t like Mary Crawford either… so shallow!
That to begin with; then too, I thought the plot revolved too heavily on the Mr. Crawford—Maria debacle. It did not make a ton of sense; how could Mr. Crawford be such an idiot, seeing that he was in love with Fanny? Admittedly, she had been severely unencouraging, but—it was a weird thing for him to do.
Besides that, Edmund’s interest in Mary Crawford was not of the sort to make him any more likeable. That he could admire her for little more than her general pleasantness, and even allow her to convince him to do things he knew were wrong, made it hard to sympathize with him in general. He was likeable to start with, and continued more or less so, but very much in spite of Mary Crawford. Granted, it’s hard to write a character in love with the wrong girl in such a way that he doesn’t seem like a bit of an idiot at best.
All things considered, I did not really like the plot of Mansfield Park.
4/10
The Point
No single point jumped out at me, but after giving it some thought, I concluded that you could take the contrast between Fanny and—well, all the rotten characters, as the embodiment of the main moral. Fanny is actually unselfish, kind, and moreover doesn’t boast about it (unlike Aunt Norris); she is principled and upright (unlike Mr. Crawford); and she is humble and patient (unlike Maria). Good as far as it goes, but I felt that I was still missing something, so I went and read up on some different perspectives on Mansfield Park (not something I usually do for my book reviews… I often think that most authors wouldn’t recognize their book if they only saw the fragments left by their critics). There are plenty of conflicting opinions; but one thing that helped me was taking another look at the contrast between Fanny and Mr. Crawford. Mr. Crawford is an actor—all through his life, adapting himself to other people in order to get what he wants from them. Fanny, on the other hand, “can’t act.” She is shy, but she is also sincere, and will not change her behavior and personality in order to fit in for a pleasanter experience.
Besides this, there are lots of other subsidiary points and threads of morals and so forth. Edmund’s intention to enter the church and Mary Crawford’s dislike of the church lead to several reflective conversations on the subject—making Mansfield Park in some ways the most explicitly Christian of Austen’s novels, though her characters have no relationship with God (to give Austen the benefit of the doubt, possibly prayer and so forth is meant to be taken for granted).
The general impression I’m left with is that Austen wanted to explore a few different themes, falling more or less under the heading of the corruption and insincerity of society vs. conscience and principle. But I think that if Austen could have embraced some particular side of Fanny’s virtues, or some particular one of the themes of the book, and drawn it to a finer point, Mansfield Park would have felt more cohesive… or more conclusive. As it is, the book calls for thought, but doesn’t point out exactly what direction thought is meant to go. Witness my own uncertainty as to what the point of the book is!
6/10
The Style
If you’ve ever read anything (else) by Austen, you know that her sense of ironic humor is one of the best things about her books. Unfortunately, little of that comes through in Mansfield Park. I’m not sure I laughed aloud even once. There is some humor given the ridiculous Aunt Norris, and Mr. Crawford’s stupidity has some irony; but none of it is exceptionally funny.
In general, the style of the writing is elegant, direct, readable and smooth—but missing the constant subtle humor I expect from a Jane Austen novel.
5/10
Conclusion
5/10
Mansfield Park’s plot is complex and the unfortunate heroine gets put through quite a lot before finally finding a happy ending. If shy, sensitive characters are your thing, you will probably like Fanny Price; but I would have enjoyed a character with more spirit better. Fanny’s sincerity and conscientious uprightness is perhaps the book’s main moral, though there are several other good points made incidentally throughout. With Jane Austen’s usual elegant and readable style, but without as much of her sense of irony as in other books, Mansfield Park is not a bad companion for a rainy afternoon—but it won’t be showing up on my favorite book list.
You can download an ebook version of Mansfield Park for free at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/141
Have any questions about Mansfield Park? Thoughts of your own to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
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What do you think?