The importance of place: Mansfield Park

Abstract

Mansfield Park (1814) was written more than ten years after Pride and Prejudice but before Emma and Persuasion. I have chosen to deal with it last because it is Jane Austen’s most complex and also, I think, her most interesting novel. It is also, however, the novel many readers like least, or find most difficult to get on with when they first read it. I have already suggested that it’s a good idea to read more of Jane Aus-ten’s novels than the one you are actually studying and, because of its comparative difficulty, this is particularly true if you are studying Mansfield Park. If you read it alongside something like Pride and Prejudice you should be in a position to approach Mansfield Park more confidently since the two novels, though so different in tone, have many themes and methods in common. Like Jane Austen’s other novels, Mansfield Park is a love story in which the heroine’s rejection of one man and love for another involve important moral decisions; it deals with the by now familiar opposition and confusion of material and moral values; and its plot structure — introduction, development to a crisis, and the effects of that crisis — is also the one you are already familiar with. So though you might find some aspects of the novel unfamiliar or off-putting, you can feel confident with many of its basic themes and techniques.