Fanny Price is a poor relation, the eldest daughter of an inadvisable marriage, who grows up in her wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal. Her only real friend is her cousin Edmund, the younger of the family's two sons. As the children attain adulthood, Mansfield Park becomes the scene of games, balls, and theatricals -- but who will see timid Fanny as the eligible young woman that she is?
Mansfield Park is one of Austen's more sophisticated novels; together with the gently satirical depiction of polite society it exposes the ills of class prejudice, and before achieving the requisite happy ending, the people of Mansfield Park must cope with adultery, betrayal, social ruin and ruptured friendships.
Mansfield Park is introduced by H.M. Daleski, formerly President of the International Dickens Society and Chairman of the Department of English at the Hebrew University. He is the author of Dickens and the Art of Analogy, The Divided Heroine, Unities: Studies in the English Novel, and other books.
| |
|
