Mansfield Park - Paperback

by Jane Austen (Author)

Mansfield Park, published in 1814, remains a unique novel in Jane Austen's oeuvre. Markedly contrasting Pride and Prejudice, its immediate predecessor, Mansfield Park does not celebrate the traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity andightness associating them with happiness and virtue, but rather praises social stasis.ionel Trilling, in discussing the novel, examines this departure and observes, 'It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being. Never before had the moralife been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. The sanctions upon which it relies are not those of culture, of quality of being, of personality but precisely those which the new conception of the moralife minimizes, the sanctions of principle and it discovers in principle the path to the wholeness of the self which is peace when we have exhausted our anger at the offence which Mansfield Park offers to our conscious pieties, we find it possible to perceive how intimately it speaks to our secret in expressible hopes.'

Front Jacket

At ten years old, Fanny is sent to live with rich relatives at Mansfield Park. Fanny doesn't fit in there but she is grateful for the friendship of her cousin, Edmund. Years later, the arrival of Henry and Mary Crawford upsets their quiet lives. With even Edmund acting differently, can Fanny stay true to herself?

Back Jacket

At ten years old, Fanny is sent to live with rich relatives at Mansfield Park. Fanny doesn't fit in there but she is grateful for the friendship of her cousin, Edmund. Years later, the arrival of Henry and Mary Crawford upsets their quiet lives. With even Edmund acting differently, can Fanny stay true to herself?

Author Biography

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 at Steventon near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. She lived with her family at Steventon until they moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After his death in 1805, she moved around with her mother; in 1809, they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. Here she remained, except for a few visits to London, until in May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. There she died on July 18, 1817. As a girl Jane Austen wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were only published after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. These are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma(1816). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1818 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815-16. She also left two earlier compositions, a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.