Mansfield Park Essay, Research Paper

Mansfield Park

This novel, originally published in 1814, is the first of Jane Austen’s novels not to be a

revised version of one of her pre-1800 writings. Mansfield Park has sometimes been

considered atypical of Jane Austen, as being solemn and moralistic, especially when

contrasted with the immediately preceding Pride and Prejudice and the immediately

following Emma. Poor Fanny Price is brought up at Mansfield Park with her rich uncle

and aunt, where only her cousin Edmund helps her with the difficulties she suffers from

the rest of the family, and from her own fearfulness and timidity. When the

sophisticated Crawfords (Henry and Mary), visit the Mansfield neighbourhood, the moral

sense of each marriageable member of the Mansfield family is tested in various ways,

but Fanny emerges more or less unscathed. The well-ordered (if somewhat vacuous)

house at Mansfield Park, and its country setting, play an important role in the novel,

and are contrasted with the squalour of Fanny’s own birth family’s home at Portsmouth,

and with the decadence of London.

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