Mansfield Park

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps Jane Austen's Masterpiece
Review: Mansfield Park might indeed be the crowning novel of Jane Austen's cannon; in which all of her authorial merits are present and paramount. Where Pride and Prejudice sparkles, Mansfield Park is solid gold. Pride and Prejudice can pass as a whimsy, an entertaining story, but Mansfield Park has pure heart. It ventures slightly deeper into the human condition and emerges slightly higher, ringing slightly truer than what is often considered to be Austen's most popular novel.

For reasons already mentioned, Pride and Prejudice is still my favorite of Austen's books, though Mansfield Park is right up there with it. It would be like comparing the two heroines of each novel; Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price. Elizabeth is witty and beautiful and idependent; Fanny is good and wholesome and always considerable of what is right. We, the readers, have more fun tailing after the sparkling Elizabeth, but we admire and advocate Fanny.

In short, Mansfield Park is arguably Jane Austen's best and definitely a must-read for Austen and Victorian fans. And although the cousin-love thing is slightly unnerving to our modern sensibilities, Edmund's final confession can't be rivaled by either Darcy's or Knightly's at all.

Rating:
Summary: A Strange Book - Perhaps Austen in Drag?
Review: Like all devoted lovers of Jane Austen, I have long pondered why she chose to write this, of all books, at time she was experiencing the intoxicating success of Pride and Prejudice.

The protagonist is a loathesome little priss. Austen herself says so in her letters. Fanny Price is neurotic and oversensitive where Austen's other heroines are brash and healthy. Even Austen's own family found the ending as odd and disappointing as do subsequent generations of readers.

So there's a puzzle to be solved here. The answer may lie in the fact that this book was written when, after a lifetime of obscurity, Austen found herself, briefly, a huge success. As is so often the case with writers, the success of her earlier book may have given her the courage to decided write about something that REALLY mattered to her--and what that was was her own very complex feelings about the intensely sexual appeal of a morally unworthy person.

This topic, the charm of the scoundrel, is one that flirts through all her other books, usually in a side plot. However, the constraints of Austen's day made it impossible for her to write the story of a woman who falls for a scoundrel with a sympathetic viewpoint character.

So what I think Austen may have decided to do was to write this story using Edmund--a male--as the sympathetic character who experiences the devastating sexual love of someone unworthy. Then, through a strange slight of hand, she gives us a decoy protagonist--Fanny Price, who if she is anything, is really the judgemental, punishing Joy Defeating inner voice--the inner voice that probably kept Jane from indulging her own very obvious interest in scoundrels in real life!

In defense of this theory, consider these points:

1. Jane herself loved family theatricals. Fanny's horror of them and of the flirting that took place is the sort of thing she made fun of in others. Jane also loved her cousin, Eliza, a married woman of the scoundrelly type, who flirted outrageously with Jane's brother Henry when Jane was young--very much like Mary Crawford. The fact is, and this bleeds through the book continuously, Austen doesn't at all like Fanny Price!

To make it more complex, Fanny's relationship with Henry Crawford is an echo of the Edmund-Mary theme, but Austen makes Henry so appealing that few readers have forgiven Austen for not letting Fanny liven up a little and marry him! No. Austen is trying to make a case for resisting temptation, but in this book she most egregiously fails.

2. Austen is famous for never showing us a scene or dialogue which she hadn't personally observed in real life, hence the off-stage proposals in her other books.

Does this not make it all the more curious that the final scene between Edmund and Mary Crawford in which he suffers his final disillusionment and realizes the depths of her moral decay comes to us with some very convincing dialogue? Is it possible that Jane lived out just such a scene herself? That she too was forced by her inner knowlege of what was right to turn away from a sexually appealing scoundrel of her own?

3. Fanny gets Edmund in the end, but it is a joyless ending for most readers because it is so clear that he is in love with Mary. Can it be that Austen here was suggesting the grim fate that awaits those who do turn away from temptations--a lifetime of listening to that dull, upstanding, morally correct but oh so joyless voice of reason?

We'll never know. Cassandra Austen burnt several years' worth of her sister's letters--letters written in the years before she prematurely donned her spinster's cap and gave up all thoughts of finding love herself. Her secrets whatever they were, were kept within the family.

But one has to wonder about what was really going on inside the curious teenaged girl who loved Samual Richardson's rape saga and wrote the sexually explicit oddity that comes to us as Lady Susan. Perhaps in Mansfield Park we get a dim echo of the trauma that turned the joyous outrageous rebel who penned Pride and Prejudice in her late teens into the staid, sad woman when she was dying wrote Persuasion--a novel about a recaptured young love.

So with that in mind, why not go and have another look at Mansfield Park!

Rating:
Summary: Dissapointment
Review: Don't get me wrong- I love Jane Austen. And thats the reason I gave the book 3 stars. But this is not her best book. Is not because it's too long, Emma is longer, but is a lot of talking, and she doesnt develop Fanny and edmund relationship enough. they fall in love and get married in the last two paragraphs. I sincerely didnt like it. I only finish it because Jane Austen is my favorite author.

Rating:
Summary: good structure and style tailored to evoking characters
Review: Mansfield Park is the work of a mature Austen. Compared to her earlier book, Pride and Prejudice, it features a particularly complex plot structure (complex for Austen, anyway) that works especially well in the first volume, and somewhat less well in the second. The book also features Austen's characteristic nicety of interior character description, her really superior ability to follow the subtle nuances of thought and feeling. This ability is raised to a whole new level, however, in Mansfield Park since the heroine, Fanny Price, is a particularly sensitive, selfless, and considerate girl. Austen is up to the challenge, though, and develops stylistic techniques uniquely and perfectly suited to evoking all of Fanny's moral and emotional struggles. It is simply a joy to follow Fanny through all her travails.

The weakness of the book is the structure of the third and last volume. Here, Austen falls back a little to much on the technique of letter writing to move her story forward. This weakness IS offset somewhat by the wonderful scenes in Fanny's hometown of Portsmouth - scenes that evoke one of Dickens' favorite themes, the impoverished family - but overall, the structure here is not up to the standards of the first two volumes.

Another weakness, though this is more a comment on Austen's style than on this book in particular, is the paucity of vivid imagery, of truly original metaphors or similes. Compared to Dickens or Flaubert, two of her near contemporaries, Austen is decidedly inferior on this score. Her strength really lies in her ability to describe the subtleties of the emotional and intellectual lives of her characters with a fidelity and clarity that I think is superior to Dickens and the equal of Flaubert.

Finally, a comment on Fanny's 'likeability'. While I don't want to deny that a character's likeability can influence our enjoyment of a book, I also think that it should not be a consideration in our judgement of the book's merit as a work of art. Madame Bovary, the book by Flaubert, is populated by unlikeable people and there isn't any one we can 'identify' with (or so we hope), yet that book is certainly a great work of art. In the same way, our gut reaction to Fanny may not be favorable, but this should have nothing to do with our assessment of Fanny as a character or the book as a work of art. The only consideration should be, 'did Austen succeed in creating the kind of character she set out to create?'; NOT, 'did I like Fanny Price as a person?', or, 'would I like to have Fanny Price as a friend?'.

Anyway, a good book, flawed only by the somewhat weak final volume. Certainly one of Austen's best.

Rating:
Summary: Great...but uneven.
Review: Jane Austen is one of the best storytellers I have had the pleasure of reading. My favorite aspect of Austen's writing is her characterization; She acquaints the reader with her characters through the most ingenious and subtle techniques. My favorite denizen of Mansfield Park is the irritating and repulsive Mrs. Norris, who is a preeminent example of masterful characterization. For an illuminating artistic look at this novel read Vladimir Nabokov's wonderful and incomparable "Lectures on Literature", which includes a detailed study of "Mansfield Park"---don't miss it, it's a real treat.

While I have enjoyed other books by Austen, this one is unique among them in that the plot structure is, for the most part, quite complicated; and, what singles "Mansfield Park" out artistically is its style, as opposed to its story. Some passages are exceptional; for example, the scene where the main characters stroll about Sotherton Court approximates the scene at the county fair in Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" in its complexity, orchestration, and execution. Parts of "Mansfield Park" are simply exquisite.

Unfortunately, the denouement is something like a train wreck. The last 1/3-1/4 of the book is stylistically dull, though structurally sound, and the last twenty or so pages read like Cliff Notes. The ending should have been much longer in order to resolve the various, complicated elements of the plot with the stylistic grace of the first 2/3s of the novel. The uneven execution sets "Mansfield Park" a step below the best of Austen's (approximate) contemporaries (Flaubert and Dickens, for example), but "Mansfield Park" still makes the short list of my favorite novels.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This book starts off slowly but picks up its pace after the marriage of one of its character. Fanny, the book's heroine, is bland and boring in the beginning but becomes increasingly interesting as the book moves along. There are two obvious couples in this book that the reader can cheer for, Henry with Fanny and Mary with Edmund. Just when it seems that Jane Austen would transform Henry from an arrogant gentleman into a thoughtful and sensitive suitor for Fanny (like Mr. Darcy in P&B) and Mary from a money-hungry woman to someone succumbing to the power of love, she drops the bomb on all of us with a scandal that leaves everyone in the end not completely happy. Sure, Fanny eventually marries someone she loves, but do we really want our heroine to marry someone who only thinks of her as a sister and loves her only after another woman breaks his heart? If it's a tragic ending that Jane Austen wants, then make it tragic. If it's supposed to be a happy ending, then please make it all-out happy. This middle-of-the-road kind of happy ending is most unsatisfying.

Rating:
Summary: Fanny is bland and insipid.
Review: With all of Ms. Austen's delightful, engaging heroines, couldn't she have done better with this one?

WHAT a tiresome prig she is!

Rating:
Summary: Another Great Austen Book
Review: A MUST read for Jane Austen followers!

Rating:
Summary: First Rate Listening Experience!
Review: This audiocassette is one of the best books on tape I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Maureen O'Brien just brings every character to life--even Mr. Rushworth, something of a blockheaded cipher in the novel, has a personality all his own! I cherished every word, every turn of phrase, so brilliantly written by Jane Austen, of course, but so delightfully emphasized by the amazing voice, diction and acting ability of Ms. O'Brien. Forgo that horrible movie made of Mansfield Park a couple years ago, and listen to this cassette instead, if you want a dramatic presentation.

Rating:
Summary: I, as a devoted Austen fan, was disapointed in this book
Review: I have read all of Austens books, excluding Persuasion, and I think that this was the worst of her novels. The main character was boring and a pushover if not unlikeable. However, that is not my reason for not liking it. I found it boring and last 3 chapters or so scandal breaks. Not only are the chapters leading up to these scandals dull but when they occur they happen to people who have been so far removed from the plot that one cannot sympathize with them. The movie was actually better than the book. A rare occurance and one I did not expect from the acclaimed Miss. Austen.