10. What’s Wrong with Mansfield Park

I have been thinking about this moment with trepidation ever since it became apparent that I was not going to be allowed to get away with just talking to you about Pride and Prejudice. I find Mansfield Park the most troubling, the most complicated of Jane Austen’s novels, and I am not alone. R. W. Chapman, the great modern editor of her works, calls it ‘the most difficult’ and acknowledges that it divides readers, not least on the subject of its heroine, Fanny Price. As we’ll see, it divided ..