| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780451531117 | | Publisher: Signet Classics | | Publish Date: 12/2/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 207886970 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7H x 4L x 1T | | Pages: 432 |
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| | | | "About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income..." (from the first line) "Mansfield Park" encompasses not only Jane Austen''s great comedic gifts and her genius as a historian of the human animal, but her personal credo as well--her faith in a social order that combats chaos through civil grace, decency, and wit. Revised reissue.
| PraiseLondon Review of Books
"'Is she queer?--Is she prudish?' These are not quotations from contenders in the brouhaha over Jane Austen's sexuality. They are questions the rakish Henry Crawford in 'Mansfield Park' asks as he wonders about the nerdiest of all heroines, Fanny Price. The erotic charm that makes other women in that novel yield one after another to Henry's desire fails to make a dent on this mousy and withdrawn girl...Henry Crawford's sense that Fanny is either queer or prudish also describes two contending traditions of Austenian reception that have prevailed since the mid-19th century...Those adhering to the elegaic tradition...believe Austen gives us a reassuringly orthodox world...where...the desires of gentlemen and ladies for each other are obviously complementary, mutually fulfilling, and above all inevitable...[In] another, anti-normative tradition...Austen has been suspected of sexual abnormality for a good long time..." - Claudia Johnson 10/05/1995"Lectures on Literature"
"'Mansfield Park' is a fairy tale....The charm of 'Mansfield Park' can be fully enjoyed only when we adopt its conventions, its rules, its enchanting make-believe. Miss Austen's is not a violently vivid masterpiece....Novels like 'Madame Bovary' or 'Anna Karenina' are delightful explosions admirably controlled. 'Mansfield Park', on the other hand, is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child." - Vladimir Nabokov 1980 Salon
"What is the matter with Fanny Price, shadow heroine of Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'? Why is she so wimpy, nervous, passive, lacking in spirit, so relentlessly correct, so given--when she is invited--to little puffs of sanctimony, and why despite these qualities does she end up the respected mistress of the Bertram family and of their worthy country seat, Mansfield Park?...Not one of [Austen's other] heroines...has begun life as radically disentitled as Fanny Price of Portsmouth, and in the reading and understanding of her character we can bring forward some of our contemporary psychological insights....[O]nce again, Austen has read all the signs and correctly apportioned the rewards." - Carol Shields 01/12/1998 |
| Author BioJane Austen was the daughter of a well-connected country clergyman in a small village in southern England, and was distantly related to the aristocracy. She had six brothers and a sister--Cassandra, her best friend and confidante. Although she often wrote about marriage and courtship, Austen never married, nor did her sister. The Austen household was lively, jolly, and bookish, and Jane and her siblings loved performing in amateur theatricals (a pastime which plays a vital part in the plot of her novel MANSFIELD PARK). Jane and Cassandra were taught mostly at home, and learned only the trivial accomplishments necessary to proper young women of the period--music, drawing, dancing, etc.--but Jane was also widely read in literature, including the classics. She began writing her witty, satirical novels to amuse her family, but eventually (1809), when she began writing more seriously, she kept her work secret. All together, she completed six novels that parody the social mores of the time, writing about middle-class provincial life with psychological insight and humor. In 1816, she became afflicted with Addison's disease; she died the next year at age 41 in Winchester, and was buried in the cathedral there. Her gravestone bears a long and affectionate inscription attesting to "the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind," but omitting any mention of her career as a writer. Austen is revered for her satirical portraits of English life, and for her use of the interior monologue to convey character--a relatively new device at the time she was writing. Her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, praised "the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment." Her work is also the prototype for a debased version of it, the perennially popular "Regency" romance. By the end of the 20th century, her work--the reputation of which had fluctuated widely since her death--became popular again, and was the source of several movies and TV adaptations.
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