Mansfield Park: the most underappreciated book of all time?

[paintandbrush]

Listened to this while painting the kitchen. Large chunks of the middle drag on a bit, but otherwise this is one of my favourite JA novels.

It's such a modern story, it could work well even today: Poor girl from Portsmouth goes to live with better-off family. Life isn't great. She returns, only to realise her father's a filthy old alcoholic, her mother's lazy and there are now a dozen cheeky kids living in squalor. Life is now worse. And then she marries her cousin but let's forget that bit.

I believe MP gets ignored because it's not as 'light' as Austen's other novels iyswim. It really is a work of brilliance though (and deserves its own appreciation thread!)

On the hair, it could be the fashion for cutting and curling the front of the hair and then piling the rest up in a Grecian style (1st pic).

Or possibly cutting it completely short like Lady Caroline Lamb (2nd pic). However that's just a guess.

I really struggle with Anne in Persuasion (I think Emma might have overtaken it as my favourite) - I just can't get past the way she behaved with Wentworth early on. It doesn't fit with how we see Anne; yes, she'd lost her mother not too long before, she had the pressure from the awful Lady Russell, she had the snobby father and sister - but still, it never seems valid. Her subsequent character behaviour is so at odds with that - and because of that dissonance, I struggle to believe her as a character throughout - I can't empathise.

I never liked fanny, but I like mp. I think I like all the characters apart from the good ones. It's only a book and shit happens. Henry Crawford is my favourite ja villain.

To be fair I like Lady Betram offering a pug.

sadik I'm always spotting people I know in Austen! Mrs Norris and Isabella's brother in Northanger Abbey spring to mind. I always was a little disappointed by the lack of analysis on Mrs N, though. You never found out what drove her to behave that way, iyswim.

I always thought the silence was supposed to signify that a. nobody cared and b. nobody wanted to probe too deeply into where their sudden wealth was coming from. Again, could work well in a modern novel about corrupt rich gits.

Did Lady B have a drug habit? Never picked up on that.

It's years since I read MP but I do remember being fascinated by the Portsmouth section and the description of the squalor of Fanny's parents house. I always thought that was some of the best writing in the book.
Must read it again one day.

I always thought that Mrs Norris's problem was meant to be boredom and an excess of time on her hands? I think JA says right at the start that if she'd had lots of children and had to make her 'small' income go a long way she'd have been profitably occupied and actually much happier.

I was thinking about this last night, and I think one reason that Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice are my favourite Austens are that they're very complete and pleasing in that every character has a 'point', IYKWIM - nobody is there as filler.

Maybe there WAS a snob element to Anne. I've never thought of her in that way, but she WAS young, and had the influence of Lady Russell, Sir Walter and her sister growing up. And I think there is a practical, pragmatic side to her too. Perhaps a young, unproven Naval officer was indeed a step too far for a young Anne.

Just to chip in on Persuasion and Anne, I don't think she was wrong to refuse him at that time and I don't think the book draws that conclusion, either. I think the thing that changes is that he saw her decision at the time as evidence of a weakness in her character; when he returns and gets to know her properly he realises she is not weak, but reserved, thoughtful and practical. At the end of the novel he comes to understand her character better and laments his own stubbornness and anger. She was young and guided by a mother figure to not engage herself to a man of no means. At the time he proposed he had no way of supporting her or a family. Later on Wentworth's own sister discusses the idea of long engagements and how unwise it would be for a young couple to enter into an engagement when there is no knowing when the situation may be resolved by marriage.

Anne wryly observes when Louisa leaps off the wall that maybe Wentworth will see that taking your time and the advice of others before pursuing a course of action is a strength rather than a weakness. He is the one who regrets not coming back a year later after he made his fortune. It was his pride that stopped them being happy sooner, not her snobbery. At the end of the novel Anne observes that she was hard on herself for being persuaded by Lady Russell, she was young and it was prudent at the time.

Anne is not a snob, couldn't be further from it. She disdains her father and sister's social climbing and worship of people in high society who have no manners or character. She disdains Mr Elliot and sees through him from the start. She loves the easy, unpretentious company of Admiral Croft and his wife, the Harvilles and their small but hospitable home, she rejects socialising with Lady wotsit for the company of her old school friend Miss Smith.

She turned down Charles Musgrove because she didn't love him, even though he was well settled.

I agree that Anne is very far from being a snob.

I love MP too. There was a fab BBC (?) adaptation of it years ago with Sylvestra Le Touzel (great name) which makes Fanny a sympathetic character with a bit of grit.

I don't think Anne is a snob at all.

She was brow beaten into refusing Wentworth, but it really was the right decision.

I think her life afterward was punishment enough for it, too! And really they both needed to grow up a bit...

Plus, it was nice to read about a woman, not a girl in the first throes of love.

Fanny and Edmund are the worst characters ever written and I hate them. HATE them.

Aside from that, I don't even think the book was good. The plot was a bit crap. The writing lacked her usual wit. The whole thing is just a bit meh.

Just found this:

Even C. S. Lewis—in the voice of his demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters—let loose a vitriolic rant about Austen’s most priggish heroine, calling her “not only a Christian, but such a Christian—a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss … A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile … Filthy, insipid little prude!”

Fanny is insufferable, I agree, but Edmund is also incredibly sanctimonious and humourless - my credibility fail in MP is that the lively, rich, irreverent social butterfly Mary Crawford would let herself fall for a dull clergyman second son for five seconds, let alone seriously consider marrying him! (I can't remember whether she only gets serious about marriage after Tom becomes ill and there's a possibility he will die and Edmund inherit...?)

And when you add into the mix Henry Crawford apparently genuinely falling for Fanny after deciding to toy with her feelings for a joke when he's bored, you would have to come up with a subtext where both Crawfords, having been made jaded and cynical about love and marriage by the Admiral's conduct, now both have a sort of unwilling fetish for decent, morally upright, not terribly exciting people.....?

Malvolia

Yes, Mary and Edmund is a weird one, isn't it? She is (half) serious about Edmund long before Tom gets ill but I don't think she's ever really committed to it -- there's always something holding her back.

You have to wonder what life was like growing up with their Uncle and Aunt (just like Fanny!). It just sounds like such a toxic set-up, with the aunt mistreated and moaning to Mary and the uncle schooling Henry into a really misogynistic way of thinking. Maybe they are reacting against that, maybe they're desperate to find some kind of loving, moral mother/father figure that they can trust? Just how 'vicious' is the Admiral's 'vicious conduct'?

Interestingly, Austen specifies that Henry Crawford is attracted to Fanny's modesty and piety, though he doesn't have the language to describe it in exactly those terms. According to Henry, Fanny will be enough to convert his uncle, being the kind of woman the admiral thinks doesn't exist.

Thinking about it, maybe Mary is attracted to Edmund because he feels like the reverse of the Admiral. Both the Crawford siblings are trying to prove something to their uncle, perhaps.

paintandbrush

Lady Bertram's drug habit was invented by Patricia Rozema in the 1999 Mansfield Park film. But, laudanum was very widely available and Lady Bertram does seem to spend most of her time pretty out of it, so it's not inconsistent with what Austen's portraying.

Interesting. I always thought she was just a shiftless layabout myself.

I think there's a suggestion that two of the three Ward sisters (that is their name, isn't it?) are essentially lazy, shiftless and not the brightest (the ones who become Lady Bertram and Mrs Price) and the one who becomes Mrs Norris is an altogether spikier, more energetic character who's always bustling about.

I think even Fanny, who loathes Aunt Norris, admits to herself at some point that Aunt Norris would have been a better mother of a big family and manager of a household than her own mother, who is essentially Lady Bertram in temperament, but poor.

Well, poor Mrs Price has a lot of children -- we're told that after about 11 years of marriage she's preparing for her ninth lying in.

Are the three sisters perhaps variations on a theme -- the theme being, like at the end of Middlemarch, the narrow, confined possibilities open to women?

I think that the opening of MP suggests that it's as much about the arbitrariness of women's fates depending on who they marry as anything else, maybe? Miss Maria Ward bags Sir Thomas, which (from what I remember) surprises people because of he could have married someone with more of a fortune, while one sister makes a solid but unexciting match to a clergyman who then gets the Mansfield living, and the other marries a marine, who turns out to a be a poor choice from several points of view.

Are we told that Fanny's mother eloped? Or something about her not telling anyone about her marriage until afterwards, which I suppose is the same thing?