In her rousing defense of Fanny Price from a 2014 Paris Review essay, Tara Isabella Burton writes: It’s easy to dismiss Fanny for being dull, quiet, and submissive, but the context of her upbringing can’t be ignored. That Fanny’s social status is so precarious added a layer of intrigue for me - the stakes may not be sky high, but suddenly there’s something darker and more sinister at play.įanny herself is, you guessed it!, my favorite heroine for similar reasons.
Consequently, Fanny is nothing like the brash Emma Woodhouse or the self-assured Lizzy Bennet or any of the other bold, brazen Austen heroines that are so universally adored - and it’s because she quite literally cannot afford to be. Unlike most of Austen’s heroines, Fanny Price is poor, with little to no prospects in her life, until she’s plucked from obscurity at age 11 to live with her wealthy cousins at the titular Mansfield Park, who give her quite the Cinderella treatment, with the exception of her cousin Edmund, who actually dares to pay her the time of day. Mansfield Park just had that elevated je ne sais quoi that I was looking for. (This isn’t confined solely to the romance genre it’s the reason Much Ado About Nothing is one of my least favorite Shakespeare plays. But it’s the reason I can’t really get into romance narratives I need there to be something bigger going on than ‘will x and y end up together’. This isn’t a criticism I can’t fault her for something she isn’t trying to do. One thing that I tend to look for in books, strictly as a personal preference, is high stakes, which are something that’s conspicuously lacking from most Austen novels. I’m sure some of you will think I’m being a contrarian just for the sake of it, given that this is widely regarded as her worst novel, but hopefully I can convince you of some of its merits by the end of this (highly anticipated?) review.
This is the only Austen novel I actively enjoyed reading the only one I thought about when I put it down the only one that I actually think will be worth revisiting.
But I still went ahead and read through all of them this year, and a few months after having finished this project, the one that stands out to me head and shoulders above the rest is Mansfield Park. Full disclosure that I wouldn’t exactly call myself the biggest Austen fan - I can recognize where Pride and Prejudice is romantic and Sense and Sensibility is charming, but personally I remain curiously unmoved by most of her works.
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