Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Egerton, 1814; Penguin 2003)

Over Christmas, Patricia Rozema's 1999 film of Mansfield Park was on TV, and Gregory and I watched it with my Dad.  As it turned out, this was a doomed endeavour on many fronts.  Firstly, my parents have recently acquired a new telly; after years of badgering from my film-loving brother, frustrated by the poor quality of the hardware available at for communal film-watching over Christmas, they gave in and invested in a large, wide-screen type affair.  Unfortunately the model they chose seems to turn even good films into terrible ones - for some reason, immune to endless fiddling with light and contrast levels, everything looks dreadful on it, over-lit and stagey.  Rozema's Mansfield Park was far from equal to the challenge.  Secondly, my Dad is a frustrating companion for film-watching.  While he has overcome a habit that lasted through my childhood of peering at the screen and asking whether any given actor is Donald Sutherland, he still makes his contempt for any sub-standard offering plain while remaining nonetheless determined to see it through to the end and distract other viewers with his commentary.

Thirdly, I had seen the film when it first came out, and had remembered it as much better than it is.  At the time I found it desperately romantic, and must have overlooked the atrocious dialogue ("this is 1806, for God's sake"!) and cringe-inducing lesbian subtext.  However, back in Manchester after the festivities, I decided to re-read the novel.

If this blog is beginning to give the impression that I do a lot of re-reading, that is entirely accurate.  Readers divide into two camps: those who are so eager to sample as much as possible of all the wonderful literature on offer that they plunge eternally ahead, never revisiting former reads, and those who feel they haven't really read anything unless they've read it at least twice.  I belong to the latter.  Sometimes re-reading is pure indulgence - a safe voyage of familiarity rather than an exciting one of discovery.  But a really good book will always give you more on each reading, and once you've read some books several times, you have the satisfying reward of finding that you really know them well.  For me, this applies to all of Austen's novels (and most of those by E M Forster and Carol Shields, about which more in future posts).  The last three in particular, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, never fade - their insights seem sharper over time and their vision bleaker.  I didn't start loving Austen until after leaving school - we studied Persuasion for A level and I thought it would be daringly iconoclastic to announce how obvious it was that Austen was in failing health when she wrote it and that I wanted to throw it across the room.  The restraint of Anne Elliott infuriated me; I wanted everything I read or heard to be full of the fire and passion lacking thus far in my own life.  Now and for some time, as with Mozart, I feel differently.

Mansfield Park is my favourite of Austen's novels.  I know it's an odd choice.  Fanny Price is, as a heroine, no match for Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, nor can Edmund Bertram hold his own with the Messrs Darcy and Knightley.  It is everything else around this central pair that is so enthralling.  Mansfield Park has the broadest reach of all Austen's novels: it is the only one in which we have more than a glimpse of real poverty, the only one in which London is not the farthest-flung destination to which the characters travel, though it features heavily as an off-stage location, and the only one with such a rich intertextual life: what the characters read and act becomes of crucial symbolic importance.  All Austen's novels hinge on the centrality of marriage for women - it defines their destiny almost single-handed - but in Mansfield Park this is more starkly exposed than anywhere else.  The novel opens by recounting the fates of three sisters, one of whom has made a brilliant match with a baronet (to which "her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim"), another has chosen respectably but unremarkably and the third has married "to disoblige her family", falling in love with an impoverished naval officer and committing the ultimate foolishness of assuming that their infatuation will be sufficient foundation for married life.  Austen always defends those who marry for love, stating that it is wicked to do otherwise, but she makes sure that her heroines marry money, as well.  As more and more children are born to Mr and Mrs Price life becomes harder and harder, and their romantic dream is short-lived.  In an age before birth control, men and women cannot afford to be carried away by their feelings.  When the Prices' eldest girl, Fanny, is nine, she is transplanted to her aunt and uncle's home at Mansfield Park, an act of charity on the part of the Bertrams which nonetheless divides her entirely from her own family.  Her status there is very much one of the poor relation, and what comfort and friendliness she finds is owing to her cousin Edmund.  By the time Fanny is grown up, she is, inevitably, in love with him.  A fly in the ointment arrives, however, in the form of Mary and Henry Crawford, visitors from London, who play havoc with the affections of almost every member of the family.

More than in any other of Austen's novels, the knives are out: the satire aimed at the cruel, the vapid and the mercenary is mercilessly sharp.  The background in slave-driven sugar plantations in Antigua - the source of Thomas Bertram's wealth - is intruiguing, though not perhaps able to stand up to the volumes of critical ink that have been spilled over it.  And most of all, despite Fanny's meekness and infirmity, we do root for her: we long for her search for a home amid a family torn apart by crisis to be rewarded, as of course it ultimately is.

The paperback copy of this novel which we own has sentimental value for me.  When I first visited Gregory in his then home of north Hampshire, I insisted that we visit the Jane Austen House Museum in nearby Chawton, and he bought a copy of the novel in the gift shop, along with Carol Shields's excellent (and short) biography of Austen.  Beyond this most recent life, there is some wonderful secondary writing on Mansfield Park.  My favourites are Virginia Woolf's essay on Austen in The Common Reader, where she writes of the moment in which Edmund and Fanny meet then pass on the stairs with a visionary transcendence which almost transforms it into a scene from one of her own novels, and Lionel Trilling's essay on the novel in The Opposing Self.  Mansfield Park is not as delightfully witty as its predecessor, Pride and Prejudice, which Austen came to decry as "too light, bright and sparkling", but reading it gives a particular pleasure which is hard to pin down.