Mansfield Park Summary
Jane Austen

Biography EssayJane Austen stands not only as a novelist central to the Romantic period but as one of the supreme prose fiction writers of all literature written in English. Her many admirers include ... Read more

"It is a truth universally acknowledged," wrote Jane Austen in the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, "that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." With this st... Read more

In the following excerpt originally published in 1975, Butler explores the ideological conflicts—particularly between Fanny Price's Christianity and the Crawford's materialism... Read more

In the following excerpt, Wiltshire probes the psychological focus and narrative technique of Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park was published only a year after Pride and Prejudice, but moving from one no... Read more

In the following essay, Auerbach considers Fanny Price as a version of the Romantic monster. Alone among masters of fiction, Jane Austen commands the woman's art of making herself loved. She kn... Read more

In the following essay, McDonnell evaluates Mansfield Park as a Bildungsroman that deals authentically with feminine childhood experience. Mansfield Park has never lacked detractors. Kingsley Amis is ... Read more

In the following essay, Kaufmann sees Mansfield Park as primarily concerned with the responsibilities of family, rather than the contractual obligations of marriage. Mansfield Park is, above all, a no... Read more

In the following essay originally published in 1989, Said evaluates Mansfield Park as a pre-imperialist text. We are on solid ground with V. G. Kiernan when he says that ‘empires must have a mo... Read more

Patricia Rozema's 1999 film is an adaptation of Jane Austen's 1814 novel `Mansfield Park'. Although Rozema stays generally faithful to the plot of the original text, various changes have been made. Ro... Read more