SOURCE: “A Subdued Gaiety: The Comedy of Mansfield Park,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 48, No. 1, June, 1993, pp. 1-25.

In the following essay, Perkins examines Mansfield Park for its juxtaposition of two traditions of literary comedy—the sentimental humor of feminine development and Restoration wit.

At the beginning of Shirley, Charlotte Brontë warns readers fresh from the Gothic thrills of Jane Eyre not to expect anything like her earlier work. What they are about to read, she informs them, is mere lenten fare, “something unromantic as Monday morning.” Aggrieved Jane Austen fans, finding Mansfield Park rather heavy going after the “light, bright, and sparkling” Pride and Prejudice, might think that Austen would have been well-advised to include a similar disclaimer in her subdued follow-up to a popular success. Numerous hostile readers have caricatured the book as a rather dour morality tale about dull people, the ugly duckling of the Austen...