Mansfield Park

This version includes a detailed introductory annotation on how the book and the plot were created.

How well I recall the greatest literary pleasure of my life, its time and place ! A dreary winter's day without, within a generous heat and glow from the flaming grate, and I reclining at my ease on the library lounge, ''Mansfield Park' in hand. Then succeed four solid hours of literary bliss, and an absorption so great that when I mechanically close the book at the last page it is only by the severest effort that I come back to the real world of pleasant indoors and bleak outdoors. I was amazed that I, a hardened fiction reader, should be so transported by this gentle tale of Miss Austen's, and yet I enjoyed to the full the after-taste of her perfect realistic art. This first enthusiasm, however, soon abated, and I began to see flaws, to note *the prolixity and unevenness of the work, and to feel that it was almost school-girlish in tone and sentiment. While the verisimilitude is, indeed, fascinating, the realization is far from profound. And. the characters are too one-sided for full human beings - are only puppets, each pulled by a single string. Edmund Bertram is, perhaps, the most woodeny of these marionettes. Lady Bertram, the languid beauty, seems often overdrawn. Mrs. Norris is a perfect busybody, but a pettiness so absolutely consistent at length rouses our suspicions and irritates us. We feel that human nature, outside of the madhouse, does not fulfill the single types so completely. But in Fanny Price we find no flaw or artistic presentment. Here comes before our eyes a real, a free, a complex human being. ... I am acquainted with no more charming figure in fiction than Fanny; she is so completely, perfectly, deliciously feminine in instinct, feeling, manner and intelligence. - Hiram Stanley