Jane Austen-Mansfield Park

The first novel of the author's maturity, Mansfield Park is complex, highly wrought, and experimental. It marks a transitional stage between the first two published novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Austen's greatest achievements, Emma and Persuasion. It has been suggested that Mansfield Park is the writer's most autobiographical novel and that, in seeing through the eyes of Fanny Price, deemed the most moralising and judgemental of her heroines, we are seeing through the eyes of Austen herself. Though Fanny Price may be too virtuous for modern readers to take to their hearts, in Mrs Norris Austen creates one of her best, because most plausible, monsters; while in the estate of Mansfield Park itself we find some of the most fully realised descriptions of domestic interiors and exteriors in Austen's fiction. This Guide traces the response to Mansfield Park from the opinions of Jane Austen's contemporaries, through nineteenth-century reviews and twentieth-century critical analyses, including deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist, to diverse twenty-first-century approaches to the novel. Sandie Byrne selects the most useful and insightful of these responses and puts them in context, providing the reader with an essential and approachable introduction to the range of critical debate on this important novel.

Sandie Byrne

Acknowledgements The Text of the Novel Introduction 'Have you read Mansfield Park?': Contemporary Opinions of the Novel 'It has not however that elevation of virtue': Reviews from the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century Dear Jane: Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Writing and the Rise of 'Janeism' 'The first modern novel in England': New Critical and Structuralist Analyses of the Mid-Twentieth Century The Anniversary: Criticism of the 1970s and 1980s The Improvement of the Estate: Late Twentieth-Century and Early Twenty-First Century Readings 'Have you seen Mansfield Park?': Adaptations on Film and Television Select Bibliography Further Reading Index.