Book Review: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
I first started reading Jane Austen’s work in middle school, but it’s taken me years and years to get around to reading Mansfield Park. It doesn’t seem to inspire fervent love like Pride and Prejudice, a well-styled film adaptation like Emma, or deep emotional praise like Persuasion.
I had read Austen’s five other novels and finished her collection of short stories before deciding this spring that the time had come — I had made it this far, and I owed it to Austen to finish all of her works…
It took me six months to get through the first 300 pages.
Granted, I didn’t adhere to a strict reading schedule by any means. I had morning sickness during much of the spring, and all I wanted were easy reads.
After stacks of page-turners and fantasies and fun rom coms, however, I found myself excited to pick up Mansfield Park again, and those last 150-ish pages were rich and rewarding. After months of slow reading, I finished the rest of the novel in about a week.
While this story (and especially the character of Fanny Price) will be staying with me for quite some time, I wanted to share a few thoughts:
Fanny isn’t like Jane Austen’s other heroines. Her circumstances are far poorer. We journey with her from childhood into adulthood. While other Austen heroines have rich and loving family lives, Fanny is, for the most part, an island. She stands apart and this sometimes makes it difficult as a reader to sympathize with her inner thoughts. I vacillated between annoyance, frustration, sympathy, and pride for her. I’m still not sure what I think of her. One thing I did find interesting: the moral climax of her story reminded me more of Jane Eyre than of any work by Austen. I’m curious if anyone else feels similarly!
This is not a romantic book. Yes, much of the plot, particularly later in the novel, centers around courting, unrequited love, and unexpected overtures of affection. But these are all woven into the broader themes of social politics, the economic reality of women at the time, and Fanny’s moral compass. If you’re looking for any swoon-worthy Mr. Darcy moments, this book ain’t it.
The page count is too high but also just right. Remember how I said the first 300 pages dragged by? They did. I wish I could tell you that you don’t really need to read them closely, but the thing is: they’re essential in the context of those last (much more exciting) 150 pages. We get to see Fanny’s intellectual, moral, and social development, the politics of her lowly position among wealthy relatives, and the grasp of the Crawfords slowly take root over those at Mansfield.
This last point brings me to the passage that cemented Mansfield Park as a supremely worthwhile read:
“Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.”
Fanny says the above in a scene where she’s standing up for herself for what feels like the first moment in the entire book. She’s not my favorite character, this is not my favorite Austen novel, and I’m still not sure what I think about this book as a whole. But in that moment, I wanted to clap for Fanny Price. The 327 pages it took to get to that particular scene felt well worth it (and the rest of the novel did too).
I know there’s so much more to be said about Austen’s social commentary in this novel… but I’ve rambled on long enough!