Jane Austen s most ambitious novel, Mansfield Park, has always generated debate. Austen herself noted that debate when she conducted a reader survey, recording her acquaintances mixed reviews in a booklet she entitled Opinions of Mansfield Park. Is this novel s dutiful heroine, Fanny Price, admirable? Or is she (as Austen s own mother asserted) insipid ? Is Fanny actually the heroine, or does that title belong more properly to her rival, Mary Crawford? Does Fanny s uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, act as her benefactor, or as a domestic tyrant? In her notes and introduction to this final volume in Harvard s celebrated annotated Austen series, Deidre Shauna Lynch outlines the critical disagreements Mansfield Park has sparked and suggests that Austen s design in writing the novel was to highlight, not downplay, the conflicted feelings its plot and heroine can inspire.
Lynch also engages head-on with the novel s experimentalism, its technical virtuosity, and its undiminished capacity, two centuries later, to disturb and to move. Annotations clarify the nuances of Austen s language and explain the novel s literary allusions and its engagements with topical controversies over West Indian slavery and the conduct of Britain s war against France. The volume s numerous illustrations enable readers to picture the world Mansfield Park s characters inhabit, underscoring the novel s close attention to setting and setting s impact on character.
Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition opens up facets of the novel for even devoted Janeites while extending an open hand to less experienced readers. It will be a welcome addition to the shelf of any library.