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Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
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Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Penguin Classics
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Our Price: $8.00
You Save: $ ( % )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Average Customer Rating:
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Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.7
EAN: 9780141439808
ISBN: 0141439807
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 480
Publication Date: 2003-04-29
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product Release Date: 2003-04-29
Studio: Penguin Classics
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.7
EAN: 9780141439808
ISBN: 0141439807
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 480
Publication Date: 2003-04-29
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product Release Date: 2003-04-29
Studio: Penguin Classics
Editorial Review of Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
New chronology and further reading; Tony Tanner's original introduction reinstated
Edited with an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland.
Edited with an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland.
Customer Reviews of Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: I loved it until the end
Review: I just finished this novel after having read Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. It took me a while to get pulled into this novel because I really was not expecting that much from reading other opinions. Slowly I became absorbed by the personality of Fanny. She was doing an incredible job of turning Fanny gradually toward Henry Crawford and you were starting to like him when all of a sudden it was like she just got tired of the story and decided to contrive an ending. It did not fit into the ending she was developing. Edmund was starting to look like milk toast and Crawford and Fanny's relationship was starting to warm up. I think it was by far her best writing but how disappointing an ending. Someone should rewrite it.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Excellent
Review: I ordered all the books at once and they came in in a very timely matter. Not to mention the books were in excellent shape as if I just picked them up from Books a Million down the street.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Jane Austen's most complex novel...
Review: Jane Austen finished "Mansfield Park" in 1813, after "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice." It is a more complex novel than either of its precedessors or its successors ("Emma", "Persuasion", and "Northanger Abbey"). Its heroine, Fanny Price, is rather the middle child in Austen's sisterhood, often overlooked when compared to her more attractive older sisters or more interesting younger sisters. Still, Fanny Price is worth getting to know.
One of a growing brood of children in a lower middle class family in Portsmouth, Fanny is placed for raising with her much wealthier Aunt and Uncle Bertram at Mansfield Park in the English countryside. The ten year-old Fanny is painfully shy, physically sickly, and less educated than her Bertram cousins, who mostly ignore or make subtle fun of her. Another relative, her Aunt Norris, responsible for the day-to-day raising of her cousins, seems to thrive on tormenting Fanny. Only her cousin Edmund comforts her and takes an interest in her. Under his guidance, she begins to catch up to her cousins in manners, education, and physical health as she matures into an attractive young woman. Most importantly, she fortifies a strong sense of moral right and propriety.
The prolonged absence of Fanny's Uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, to tend to his estates in Antigua, leaves the household under the uncertain leadership of Aunt Norris, just as the wealthy Mary and Henry Crawford arrive from London. Mary and Henry are the same age as the older Bertram cousins, but worldly, manipulative, and less grounded in solid values. Henry flirts shamelessly with Fanny's engaged cousin Maria and trifles with Maria's younger sister Julia, while Mary flaunts her considerable charms at Edmund. The Bertrams are tempted into inappropriate behavior, which only Fanny resists.
Sir Thomas re-imposes order upon his return from the Caribbean. Maria is married off to a wealthy if rather stupid neighbor. Edmund courts Mary Crawford, to the distress of Fanny, who is in love with Edmund and who sees Mary for the shallow manipulator she is. Fanny herself is courted by Henry Crawford, who starts by trifling with her emotions but comes to seek her as a wife. Great pressure is placed on Fanny by Sir Thomas, by Edmund, and by Mary to accept Henry as an advantageous match.
The anguished Fanny holds her ground, and is effectively exiled to Portsmouth, where she finds little to love in her vulgar birth family except a promising younger sister. In her absence, the Bertram family falls to pieces in sickness and scandal. Fanny will be summoned back to Mansfield Park, to help heal the family and perhaps to have one last opportunity for personal happiness.
As Tony Tanner's excellent introduction makes clear, Fanny is unique among Austen heroines in her invariably good moral sense. Her attraction as a character is based less on the personal growth and maturation we expect in a Austen heroine and more on her heroic perseverence in the face of very attractive temptations and seemingly reasonable pressures. It is Austen's genius to insert complex characters into the subtle relationships between four families in the story. Those relationships provide a fascinating venue for social commentary and compelling domestic drama. The witty and enthusiastic but morally flawed Crawfords, for example, seem more attractive than the shy, vulnerable, and withdrawn Fanny or the understated Edmund.
"Mansfield Park" is very highly recommended to fans of Jane Austen's romances. Its complex characters and storyline may ultimately be as rewarding to the reader as the more popular novels.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Personal Favourite
Review: If all the Austen books were sisters, Mansfield Park would be the quiet, pensively courageous sibling of the six. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion all seem to glow like ladies at a ball. (Northanger Abbey would, I guess, be the sister who plays piano and can't really sing...although she tries...)
I felt this novel to have a wonderfully theatrical feel, a closet drama of sorts. The above novels are like social epics whereas Mansfield Park appears stately, stoic and unto itself, thoughtful in a way the others aren't. I still think the other novels are excellent but there is something reserved about this one in particular. I am not a dedicated Austen lover but I would chose this one over the others simply because it is the less popular and to me, the most fascinating. The social-relationship dynamics are similar to the other novels - i.e. learning that the pretty face doesn't always have a pretty soul.
Let's put it this way, I'll probably read this novel again before the others. This is the sister I would like to know, to talk with and share philosophy with. The other sisters, in my opinion are great to dance with and they'll certainly entertain you. Nothing wrong in that.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Worth reading, but not buying
Review: I've read "Mansfield Park" three times so far in a desperate attempt to like it as much as Jane Austen's other books (I even love Northanger Abbey, which NO ONE likes anymore), but it seems to get a little worse each time. While it's still worth sitting down and enjoying once, it's a lot more dependant on the tastes and principles of Austen's period than any of her other works, and it seems like on re-reading the good points don't get much stronger while its flaws glare out more and more.
There is much to enjoy in Mansfield Park. Austen's stock characters (the dominating but foolish old woman, the wise but emotionally absent father, the charming young man who does not quite deserve the main character in spite of his attractions), appear in sharper relief than any of her other novels. Mrs. Norris is too horrible for me personally to laugh at most of the time, but her blindness to her own hypocrosy and the sheer absurdity of her judgement will be appreciated by most other Austen fans. The Crawfords are two of her most intricately created and fascinating characters, and truly steal any scene either of them is included in. This novel has been called her "most autobiographical" work, and though I don't see any similarities between the personality revealed in her letters and that of her main character, Fanny's position as the poor dependant on a rich family is much closer to Austen's own than any of her other heroines, and the amount of sympathy for this Cinderella-type heroine will be appreciated even by readers who are not very interested in Jane Austen herself.
But I can't help but feeling that while her other novels have a transcendant universality (Pride and Prejudice will always work no matter how much our culture changes), Mansfield Park is very wedded to one time and place. To a modern reader, the main character, Fanny Price, is almost unlikable for at least the first half of the book. You pity her, definitely, but she's so timid and such a wet blanket that it's hard to feel any real identification. She is the wisest and kindest character in the book, but spends most of the early chapters in a state of guilt-ridden terror from her assumed inferiority and her inability to live with the fact that she cannot love an aunt who has been nothing but nasty to her her entire life. In the latter half of the novel, she gets better as she grows enough of a backbone to at least trust her own judgement, but she's still really an example of a dead feminine ideal that a modern woman just can't admire. While we still value common sense, moral fiber, and a generous and forgiving heart, conviction of one's own inferiority is not really a desirable trait.
This is the most consistant flaw of the book, but there are others almost equally troubling. Without revealing whom she ends up with, Fanny's early revealed crush on her cousin Edmund, whom she meets when he is sixteen and she is nine, gets more disturbing by the year. Not only is love between first cousins considered incestuous now (at least in the US), but the way he considers her his adopted sister, and actually calls her his favorite sister, adds a whole new level of creepiness for anyone raised in a culture in which adoptive family ties are looked at in the same way as blood ties. Then the often-cited fact that he "shaped her mind" by being the only member of the family who seriously talked to her and recommended all her reading material makes it still worse for me, because there's something about Pygmalion-type relationships that really freaks me out. Anyone who joins me in this is sure to be disturbed.
The sole remaining flaw is that three readings in, I can't make any sense of what it's supposed to mean that Sir Thomas makes his living as a slave trader. Though we're suspicious early on because of his frequent business trips to Antigua, when it finally is confirmed that this is what he does, none of the characters attatches any moral stigma to it, not even Fanny. Nor does the narrator weigh in on his profession during any of the frequent asides that judge the members of this family more harshly than her protagonist. It made even less sense when I learned that Jane Austen herself was a confirmed abolitionist in real life. Can it really be that its only purpose is to draw a comparison with Fanny's situation? Maybe even an abolitionist of that time could be ill-informed enough about what the slave trade actually entailed to use it as a metaphor without much thought, but no one picking it up today has the luxury of that kind of ignorance.
In conclusion, it's a must read for anyone scholarly interested in Jane Austen, and still enjoyable enough to be worth reading for any casual fan of her other books. But save your money and use your library card. It's not something you're going to want to read again.
Review Summary: I loved it until the end
Review: I just finished this novel after having read Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. It took me a while to get pulled into this novel because I really was not expecting that much from reading other opinions. Slowly I became absorbed by the personality of Fanny. She was doing an incredible job of turning Fanny gradually toward Henry Crawford and you were starting to like him when all of a sudden it was like she just got tired of the story and decided to contrive an ending. It did not fit into the ending she was developing. Edmund was starting to look like milk toast and Crawford and Fanny's relationship was starting to warm up. I think it was by far her best writing but how disappointing an ending. Someone should rewrite it.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Excellent
Review: I ordered all the books at once and they came in in a very timely matter. Not to mention the books were in excellent shape as if I just picked them up from Books a Million down the street.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Jane Austen's most complex novel...
Review: Jane Austen finished "Mansfield Park" in 1813, after "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice." It is a more complex novel than either of its precedessors or its successors ("Emma", "Persuasion", and "Northanger Abbey"). Its heroine, Fanny Price, is rather the middle child in Austen's sisterhood, often overlooked when compared to her more attractive older sisters or more interesting younger sisters. Still, Fanny Price is worth getting to know.
One of a growing brood of children in a lower middle class family in Portsmouth, Fanny is placed for raising with her much wealthier Aunt and Uncle Bertram at Mansfield Park in the English countryside. The ten year-old Fanny is painfully shy, physically sickly, and less educated than her Bertram cousins, who mostly ignore or make subtle fun of her. Another relative, her Aunt Norris, responsible for the day-to-day raising of her cousins, seems to thrive on tormenting Fanny. Only her cousin Edmund comforts her and takes an interest in her. Under his guidance, she begins to catch up to her cousins in manners, education, and physical health as she matures into an attractive young woman. Most importantly, she fortifies a strong sense of moral right and propriety.
The prolonged absence of Fanny's Uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, to tend to his estates in Antigua, leaves the household under the uncertain leadership of Aunt Norris, just as the wealthy Mary and Henry Crawford arrive from London. Mary and Henry are the same age as the older Bertram cousins, but worldly, manipulative, and less grounded in solid values. Henry flirts shamelessly with Fanny's engaged cousin Maria and trifles with Maria's younger sister Julia, while Mary flaunts her considerable charms at Edmund. The Bertrams are tempted into inappropriate behavior, which only Fanny resists.
Sir Thomas re-imposes order upon his return from the Caribbean. Maria is married off to a wealthy if rather stupid neighbor. Edmund courts Mary Crawford, to the distress of Fanny, who is in love with Edmund and who sees Mary for the shallow manipulator she is. Fanny herself is courted by Henry Crawford, who starts by trifling with her emotions but comes to seek her as a wife. Great pressure is placed on Fanny by Sir Thomas, by Edmund, and by Mary to accept Henry as an advantageous match.
The anguished Fanny holds her ground, and is effectively exiled to Portsmouth, where she finds little to love in her vulgar birth family except a promising younger sister. In her absence, the Bertram family falls to pieces in sickness and scandal. Fanny will be summoned back to Mansfield Park, to help heal the family and perhaps to have one last opportunity for personal happiness.
As Tony Tanner's excellent introduction makes clear, Fanny is unique among Austen heroines in her invariably good moral sense. Her attraction as a character is based less on the personal growth and maturation we expect in a Austen heroine and more on her heroic perseverence in the face of very attractive temptations and seemingly reasonable pressures. It is Austen's genius to insert complex characters into the subtle relationships between four families in the story. Those relationships provide a fascinating venue for social commentary and compelling domestic drama. The witty and enthusiastic but morally flawed Crawfords, for example, seem more attractive than the shy, vulnerable, and withdrawn Fanny or the understated Edmund.
"Mansfield Park" is very highly recommended to fans of Jane Austen's romances. Its complex characters and storyline may ultimately be as rewarding to the reader as the more popular novels.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Personal Favourite
Review: If all the Austen books were sisters, Mansfield Park would be the quiet, pensively courageous sibling of the six. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion all seem to glow like ladies at a ball. (Northanger Abbey would, I guess, be the sister who plays piano and can't really sing...although she tries...)
I felt this novel to have a wonderfully theatrical feel, a closet drama of sorts. The above novels are like social epics whereas Mansfield Park appears stately, stoic and unto itself, thoughtful in a way the others aren't. I still think the other novels are excellent but there is something reserved about this one in particular. I am not a dedicated Austen lover but I would chose this one over the others simply because it is the less popular and to me, the most fascinating. The social-relationship dynamics are similar to the other novels - i.e. learning that the pretty face doesn't always have a pretty soul.
Let's put it this way, I'll probably read this novel again before the others. This is the sister I would like to know, to talk with and share philosophy with. The other sisters, in my opinion are great to dance with and they'll certainly entertain you. Nothing wrong in that.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Worth reading, but not buying
Review: I've read "Mansfield Park" three times so far in a desperate attempt to like it as much as Jane Austen's other books (I even love Northanger Abbey, which NO ONE likes anymore), but it seems to get a little worse each time. While it's still worth sitting down and enjoying once, it's a lot more dependant on the tastes and principles of Austen's period than any of her other works, and it seems like on re-reading the good points don't get much stronger while its flaws glare out more and more.
There is much to enjoy in Mansfield Park. Austen's stock characters (the dominating but foolish old woman, the wise but emotionally absent father, the charming young man who does not quite deserve the main character in spite of his attractions), appear in sharper relief than any of her other novels. Mrs. Norris is too horrible for me personally to laugh at most of the time, but her blindness to her own hypocrosy and the sheer absurdity of her judgement will be appreciated by most other Austen fans. The Crawfords are two of her most intricately created and fascinating characters, and truly steal any scene either of them is included in. This novel has been called her "most autobiographical" work, and though I don't see any similarities between the personality revealed in her letters and that of her main character, Fanny's position as the poor dependant on a rich family is much closer to Austen's own than any of her other heroines, and the amount of sympathy for this Cinderella-type heroine will be appreciated even by readers who are not very interested in Jane Austen herself.
But I can't help but feeling that while her other novels have a transcendant universality (Pride and Prejudice will always work no matter how much our culture changes), Mansfield Park is very wedded to one time and place. To a modern reader, the main character, Fanny Price, is almost unlikable for at least the first half of the book. You pity her, definitely, but she's so timid and such a wet blanket that it's hard to feel any real identification. She is the wisest and kindest character in the book, but spends most of the early chapters in a state of guilt-ridden terror from her assumed inferiority and her inability to live with the fact that she cannot love an aunt who has been nothing but nasty to her her entire life. In the latter half of the novel, she gets better as she grows enough of a backbone to at least trust her own judgement, but she's still really an example of a dead feminine ideal that a modern woman just can't admire. While we still value common sense, moral fiber, and a generous and forgiving heart, conviction of one's own inferiority is not really a desirable trait.
This is the most consistant flaw of the book, but there are others almost equally troubling. Without revealing whom she ends up with, Fanny's early revealed crush on her cousin Edmund, whom she meets when he is sixteen and she is nine, gets more disturbing by the year. Not only is love between first cousins considered incestuous now (at least in the US), but the way he considers her his adopted sister, and actually calls her his favorite sister, adds a whole new level of creepiness for anyone raised in a culture in which adoptive family ties are looked at in the same way as blood ties. Then the often-cited fact that he "shaped her mind" by being the only member of the family who seriously talked to her and recommended all her reading material makes it still worse for me, because there's something about Pygmalion-type relationships that really freaks me out. Anyone who joins me in this is sure to be disturbed.
The sole remaining flaw is that three readings in, I can't make any sense of what it's supposed to mean that Sir Thomas makes his living as a slave trader. Though we're suspicious early on because of his frequent business trips to Antigua, when it finally is confirmed that this is what he does, none of the characters attatches any moral stigma to it, not even Fanny. Nor does the narrator weigh in on his profession during any of the frequent asides that judge the members of this family more harshly than her protagonist. It made even less sense when I learned that Jane Austen herself was a confirmed abolitionist in real life. Can it really be that its only purpose is to draw a comparison with Fanny's situation? Maybe even an abolitionist of that time could be ill-informed enough about what the slave trade actually entailed to use it as a metaphor without much thought, but no one picking it up today has the luxury of that kind of ignorance.
In conclusion, it's a must read for anyone scholarly interested in Jane Austen, and still enjoyable enough to be worth reading for any casual fan of her other books. But save your money and use your library card. It's not something you're going to want to read again.