Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
INTRODUCTION
Mansfield Park was published in three volumes by Thomas Egerton in 1814. The first edition, though it was badly printed and strewn with errors, sold out within six months. To many of the readers who had enjoyed Pride and Prejudice the year before, this new novel must have come as something of a shock. It still does. “What Became of Jane Austen?” asked Kingsley Amis in the title of a much anthologized article on the book, and his question echoes the perplexity of generations of readers. To put it at its most basic, how could the same author create one heroine like Elizabeth Bennet and then go on to create another like Fanny Price?
In the first place, the sequence of composition was not quite as straightforward as this suggests. Early versions of Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice were all written in the second half of the 1790s at a time when Jane Austen, born in December 1775, was still in her early twenties. She had lived since birth with her family at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire. Her father, George Austen, was a clergyman in comfortable circumstances, and the family had wealthy connections. (Indeed, much as Fanny Price is borne off to live with her aunt’s family at Mansfield Park, one of Jane Austen’s elder brothers had left home to be adopted by Thomas Knight, a rich cousin of their father.) The cheerful tenor of life at Steventon during these years is reflected both in Jane’s surviving letters, which start in January 1796, and in the prevailing tone of the first three novels. But this period came to an abrupt end in 1801 when, to Jane’s dismay, the family left Steventon and moved to Bath.
In the years that followed, first at Bath and later at Southampton, Jane Austen wrote little apart from the first stages of a novel called The Watsons which was never finished. This was a troubled time. As far as we can tell from the scraps of information available, she fell in love with a young clergyman in the summer of 1801 only to receive news of his death shortly afterwards. In the following year another chance of marriage came to nothing; having accepted an eligible proposal, she almost immediately changed her mind and withdrew the acceptance next morning. The death of her father in 1805 added to the unhappiness of these years. It was only when Mrs. Austen and her daughters returned to Hampshire in July 1809 and settled in the village of Chawton that Jane’s life recovered enough stability for her to turn back to her writing with a will. She revised the early drafts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, arranging for them to be published in 1811 and 1813 respectively.
These two novels remain essentially the products of an earlier stage of Jane Austen’s life. By contrast, Mansfield Park, which she had written between February 1811 and the summer of 1813, bears all the signs of an increased seriousness that had come with age, with the experience of tragedy and with what must have been a growing awareness that in her mid-thirties and without fortune she was never likely to marry. Of all her novels Mansfield Park is the most sober. “Now I will try to write of something else,” she declared in a letter to her sister Cassandra, “& it shall be a complete change of subject—ordination.” Whether or not we think that this is an accurate account of the novel’s subject, it points to a new solemnity of purpose that has an unmistakably religious coloring. Mansfield Park is the one novel by Jane Austen that has been clearly influenced by the Evangelical movement, which was calling at the time for moral reform and attempting to infuse the religious life of the country with some of its own earnestness. The author who had scoffed at Evangelicals a few years earlier can write to her niece in 1814 that she is “by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals”.