Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion are regular additions to my reading diet, but there are a couple

Jane Austen books that I read as a teenager, decided I didn’t like, and never went back. After recently discovering that I actually really like Northanger Abbey, I decided to give Mansfield Park a second try.

I started out enjoying it. Fanny Price is taken in by her aunt’s family, the Bartons. Her family is still living but the Bartons are attempting to relieve the poverty of their relatives by raising a daughter of theirs with better prospects than the Price family can manage.

So Fanny must leave her family and come to live at Mansfield Park, where she is uninteresting to her girl cousins, considered a charity case to be brought down and humiliated by her other aunt Mrs. Norris, and not really thought of by anybody else at all, except for the second born Barton son, Edmund. He alone is considerate of the fact that she has been separated from everything and everyone she knows and takes the time to comfort her and help her adjust.

This dynamic does not change as she grows, and unsurprisingly, Fanny never becomes a confident woman. She grows into a helpful, quiet person, loved in a placid, selfish way by her lackadaisical aunt Lady Barton and useful to everybody else. But she is only truly friends with Edmund, who she is secretly in love with.

This repressive situation makes her timid to the point of making me pull out my hair. The first time reading this, I didn’t like Fanny at all. The second time through I have more sympathy for her—could this character ever speak her mind more than she currently does given how she’s been treated and demeaned and snubbed her entire life? Her every feeling has been consistently discounted by people who are supposed to have sense and to love her. And yet, when the pressure is put on her, she does not cave. I repented of my earlier misjudgment of Fanny on this read through.  

Eventually Sir Barton needs to overseas to settle some business he has in another country and he leaves his wife, daughters, Fanny and sons under the guidance of first Edmund, and then later, his older son Tom. Tom does not have the good sense of Edmund, and he soon introduces a rowdy element into their family party; an actor, recently disappointed in the failure of his theatre group to get up a play. With the help of two newcomers to the neighborhood, a Mr. and Miss Crawford, Tom decides that the family will get up a play as well.

Edmund rightly thinks this is an unwise idea, and though he bends under the influence of Miss Crawford and participates, Fanny does not. So she is unencumbered to see Mr. Crawford playing with the affections of both her female cousins, one of whom is already engaged. She forms a very poor opinion of him and is very pained by Edmund’s increasing fondness for Miss Crawford, who distains the church though Edmund plans on entering the church, and is shallow and worldly.

Finally, Sir Barton returns and puts an end to the play. Mr. Crawford abandons both the sisters he has dallied with to go back to town, but Edmund and Miss Crawford continue to be infatuated with one another. The engaged cousin, mortified at her abandonment goes ahead and marries the man she no longer loves and takes her sister with her to her house.

Fanny is now alone and officially “out” and in the course of time she meets Mr. Crawford again. Bored, he decides to toy with her in much the same way that he had toyed with her cousins, but quickly finds himself genuinely in love with her. He proposes; she refuses. He then goes to Sir Barton, informs him of his suit, and conveys the information that Fanny was approving of his attentions!

This is considerably worse than the behavior that we all scorn in Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, and yet nobody in this book has the sense, ever, to be truly indignant about it. Edmund is too besotted with Miss Crawford to realize what has happened, and I can accept that, because young men in love are remarkably blind. But for not one character in the book to ever even to the end justify Fanny in her objection and recognize the wrongness of Mr. Crawford’s suit, is just unsupportable. He lies about her, and it is not even dwelt upon, as if a woman being kind and gentle makes her “no” incomprehensible.

And then, when Fanny explains that she is not interested in having Mr. Crawford for a husband, Sir Barton is actually angry at her. Thus begins the psychological torture of Fanny Price. Because Mr. Crawford is well off, Sir Barton and Edmund and the entire family basically ignore her reasonable objections, and force her to allow Mr. Crawford to continue to court her. Edmund, the only one likely to listen to her, would like his best friend to be married to his lady-love’s brother, and can’t see their lack of character.

None of them are horrible people. That’s what’s upsetting. They’re nice people—but through the whole book they do horrible things. Mrs. Norris is not checked in anything she says to Fanny by Sir or Lady Barton. In fact, even when Sir Barton realizes that Fanny has been left sitting in a cold room for winter after winter without a fire because her Aunt Norris wants her humiliated, he justifies what Mrs. Norris has done to Fanny’s face! And yes, he goes and orders a fire be lighted after that, and he himself is a nice man, but he is still blind to the horrible way she is treated right in front of him.

It all works out in the end, of course. Various events happen that lead to the obvious failure of character on the Crawford’s parts, Edmund and Miss Crawford do not become engaged, and despite all her delicacy and timidity, Fanny resists Crawford and is in due course rewarded with her true love.

I think my frustration with this book lies entirely on the fact that Austen’s disapprobation of the way Fanny is treated is simply not vehement enough for me. Even with my modern sensibilities, I can see the lack of wisdom in Tom Barton’s scheme to get up a play. But to have that railed against and fought bitterly over, while Fanny’s redemption from her family’s unjust treatment of her gets merely summary statements at the end of the book, feels disproportionate.

Allowing a child, dependent on the family, to be emotionally tortured, to be accused of disloyalty for objecting to a characterless man, to be forced to keep company with someone so careless of her actual feelings that he can’t even acknowledge a clear no—in any era that is immensely worse than the unwisdom of a play. Austen makes that clear to the reader, but it fails to satisfy because she never had any of her characters realize that in an actual, fleshed out scene. Everything comes in summary, after the fact.

I read and love Austen in part because of how she combines an excellent understanding of people’s foibles with a sense of justice. She sees those foolish parts of human nature and does not excuse the damage done.

Except here. It does seem like she is letting poor Fanny get the short end of the stick. Because during the progress of Crawford’s courtship, Austen says outright that but for Fanny’s love of Edmund, Fanny would eventually have loved Crawford and he might in turn have been truly changed by her love and become a decent husband.

This is foolishness not worthy of Austen, and too great a weight to put on any woman, especially a delicate creature like Fanny Price. Mr. Crawford, a man whose entire life has been invested in selfish amusement, would never find a happy mate in a selfless woman who wants quiet and solitude and a listening ear. He proves his absolute unfitness for her when he responds to her refusal by willfully misunderstanding her and telling her uncle she was interested! Any change on his part would have been a surface change under the influence of infatuation, and eventually he would have become bored with her and abandoned her.

And, finally, injustice upon injustice, the whole of Edmund falling for Fanny and realizing that he loves her is taken care of in a summary statement! After reading through the plodding misery and psychological torture of Fanny being exposed to Crawford’s continual advances and abandonment by her family, I expect at least one actual scene with real love.

In short, I didn’t like it when I was a teenager and even though I did like it better, it’s still on the bottom of my Austen list. (To be fair, the bottom of my Austen list is miles higher than many other books.) Nobody is bad enough to heartily dislike, but they are bad enough that I can’t deeply love them.