Book Description
Begun in 1811 at the height of Jane
Austen's writing powers and published in 1814, Mansfield Park marks a
conscious break from the tone of her first three novels, Northanger
Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, the last of
which Austen came to see as "rather too light." Fanny Price is unlike
any of Austen's previous heroines, a girl from a poor family brought up
in a splendid country house and possessed of a vast reserve of moral
fortitude and imperturbability. She is very different from Elizabeth
Bennet, but is the product of the same inspired imagination. Mansfield
Park shows Austen as a mature novelist with an almost unparalleled
ability to render character and an acute awareness of her world and how
it was changing. Through the stories of Fanny Price, the Bertrams, and
the Crawfords, she tackles the themes of faith and constancy and the
threat that metropolitan manners could pose to a rural way of life.
Mansfield Park is as amusing as any of Austen's novels, but, according
to the critic Tony Tanner, it is also arguable that it is "her most
profound novel --indeed...it is one of the most profound novels of the
nineteenth century."
About the Series:
Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual
and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations-from
contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory-as well
as a bibliography and, in most cases, a chronology of the author's life
and work.