Like many Jane Austen novels, Mansfield Park is a story about lots of different characters who social lives intersect in various ways. It really all centres around a young woman called Fanny Price, who comes to live with richer family members in Mansfield Park, because her immediate family is not in a position to support her as she requires. As you can imagine though, her presence is the catalyst for some drama.
We follow Fanny from being a little girl to being a young woman and she is a character I felt quite fond of. She didn’t endear herself to me in the same way that the overly confident Emma (from Emma) did, but nonetheless she does stand out as one of the more intriguing Austen protagonists. I admire the way that she stands up for herself and how she gently challenges the bad attitudes of the time. In particular, she seems to quietly challenge slavery, which is pretty cool as it’s not a subject I expected to see broached.
Something I found pretty sweet was Fanny’s relationship with he brother William. The two of them don’t get a huge amount of time together throughout the course of the novel, but I always enjoy seeing thm interact. I just find deep and unconditional love between adult siblings very moving – especially in work from this era. Meanwhile, and I won’t spoil anything about what happens, but I thought the romance in this novel evolved very naturally and felt very believable in a way that it often doesn’t in older novels, so that was pretty great.
Admittedly, it has its slow patches, and certain portions of the storyline are hard to relate to from a modern perspective. For instance, one part deals with a group of people planning to put on a small stage production, and the response from many of the characters, including Fanny herself, is that this is a really scandalous idea that should be avoided. It’s hard to empathise with them having such an extreme reaction to something that seems so benign.
These things aside, I still enjoyed this novel. Not as much as I enjoyed Emma, Pride and Prejudice, or Persuasion, but it was a decent reading experience and I think most fans of Austen or literature from this time will enjoy it.
Rating: 7.6/10
