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About the Salon
Brought to you
and the New York
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About Mansfield Park Following on the heels of "Pride and Prejudice's" success, "Mansfield Park" is Jane Austen's most controversial novel and the first of her mature works. Named after the great estate where most of the action takes place, the novel explores the various and troubling meanings of home, adding a new dimension of moral critique to Austen's comedies of manners. Austen's heroine is Fanny Price, a poor cousin who comes to live with the Bertram family, headed by the austere Sir Thomas and the indolent Lady Bertram. Fanny suffers from condescending relatives intent on making her aware of her inferior status. The one bright spot in her new life is the relationship she develops with Edmund, the Bertram's sensitive and principled son. As she grows older, Fanny takes pains to hide her deepening feelings for Edmund, although the indifference with which she is treated makes it unlikely that anyone will discover her secret. To make matters worse, a charming and accomplished rival arrives from London. Without the restraining presence of Sir Thomas, who is away on business (in Antigua ending a slavery revolt), the young people turn the house upside down, and Fanny must question all of the convictions she has acquired at Mansfield Park. The Bertram estate, a symbol of enduring British customs and mores, is implicated in cruelty, scandal and slavery. As Austen lays bare the crises that threatens to destroy the home from both without and within, the reader must consider whether or not the estate should be saved. Regarding Austen's most reactionary and radical novel, readers have agreed on little but its status as a masterpiece of British literature. Some have considered the novel -- whose estate is financed through slavery and whose heroine is seemingly rewarded for her narrowly defined virtue -- to be a profoundly conservative work. Others contend that the home is a more ambiguous symbol, and that Austen's irony undercuts any admiration for the estate and its mores that the novel evokes. Included in the New York Public Library's new edition of "Mansfield
Park" are a portrait of Jane Austen; a poem written
by Austen; a letter written to her sister recording a visitor's favorable
review of "Mansfield Park"; Vladimir Nabokov's notes on the novel for his
class at Cornell University, which include his sketches of Henry Crawford's
barouche and the floorplan of Mansfield Park. Sketches by Hugh Thomson for a
1903 edition are also included.
You have the option of purchasing your own copies of The New York Public Library Collector's editions of the classic books being discussed, courtesy of Borders Books and Music. Just click on:
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