Mansfield Park (World's Classics S.) - Softcover

Austen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019282757X ISBN 13: 9780192827579

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1990

Synopsis

First published in 1814, this is a study of three families - the Bertrams, the Crawfords and the Prices - in which Jane Austen uses the unlikely heroine, Fanny Price, to explore the social and moral values by which these families' lives are ordered. The text is taken from R.W.Chapman's Oxford edition, edited by James Kinsley and with additional notes from John Lucas. The new introduction is by Marilyn Butler, whose critical works include "Jane Austen and the War of Ideas" and "Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries".

About this title

Review:

The Mansfield Park of the title, a magnificent, idyllic estate which is home to the wealthy Bertram family, stands as a bastion of English tradition and stability. The novel's heroine, Fanny Price, is a "poor relation" living with the Bertrams, acutely conscious of her inferior status and yet daring to love their son Edmund--but from afar. However, with five marriageable young people on the premises, the peace at Mansfield cannot last. Courtships, entertainments and intrigues throw the place into turmoil, and Fanny finds herself unwillingly competing with a dazzlingly witty and lovely rival. As critic Margaret Drabble has pointed out, the house becomes "full of the energies of discord--sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion, and vanity," and the novel becomes ever more engrossing as it builds to Mansfield's final scandal and, finally, a satisfying conclusion. Unique in its moral design and brilliant interplay of the forces of tradition and change, Mansfield Park was the first novel of Jane Austen's maturity, and the first in which the author turned her unerring eye on the concerns of English society at a time of great upheaval.

Review:

" Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values."
--Virginia Woolf

"Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values."
--Virginia Woolf

aNever did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values.a
aVirginia Woolf

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 019282757X
• ISBN 13: 9780192827579
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 474