Mansfield Park

Fanny Price’s rich relatives offer her a place in their home so that she can be properly brought up. However, Fanny’s childhood is a lonely one as she is never allowed to forget her place. Her only ally is her cousin Edmund. When her cousins befriend two glamorous new young people who have arrived in the area, Henry and Mary Crawford, Edmund starts to grow close to Mary and Fanny finds herself dealing with feelings she has never experienced before.

About the Author

Jane Austen's life was, on the surface, uneventful and serene, but her works reveal a mind of enormous vitality and scope, and a powerful understanding of human behavior. Bom on December 16,1775, in the Hampshire village of Steventon where her father was a rector, she grew up in a lively, affectionate family, who were (she recalled) "great novel- readers." In rural Hampshire, among the minor landed gentry and country clergy so perfectly portrayed in her work, she wrote and anonymously published SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1811), PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813), MANSFIELD PARK (1814), and EMMA (1816). She never married, and she ignored literary circles, ridiculing the popular Gothic novel and rejecting the tenets of Romanticism. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published after her death on July 18,1817. Jane Austen described her own writing as a "little bit of ivory" and maintained that "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on." These self- deprecatory remarks understate the universality of her concerns and the largeness of her most prevalent theme: the need for men and women to find self- awareness and identity while accepting, out of necessity, the powerlessness and dependency which society so often confers upon them. Her flawless prose, displays such shrewd wit, delicate irony, and accomplished.