From the Bookshelf of Should have read classics…

Mansfield Park

Jane Austen

Start date: June 1, 2014

Finish date: June 30, 2014

Discussion: Group Book Discussions

Why we're reading this: This is the group read for June. Please remember spoiler alerts if the discussion is in the early stages.
[close] This is the group read for June. Please remember spoiler alerts if the discussion is in the early stages.

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What Members Thought

Sep 14, 2011 Therese rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-and-general-fiction, re-read, classics, romance

I have been reading and re-reading all of Austen's novels this year, and this one was a strange mix of frustrating and satisfying for me. It's satisfying in that it's very rich in events and characters and sheer length and detail, and it all feels deeply and fully developed. There is a lot here to think and talk about. The frustrating thing is the moralizing, which is much more prominent here than in other Austen novels I've read in the past or re-read more recently. At times it feels inauthenti I have been reading and re-reading all of Austen's novels this year, and this one was a strange mix of frustrating and satisfying for me. It's satisfying in that it's very rich in events and characters and sheer length and detail, and it all feels deeply and fully developed. There is a lot here to think and talk about. The frustrating thing is the moralizing, which is much more prominent here than in other Austen novels I've read in the past or re-read more recently. At times it feels inauthentic, like Austen is trying to suppress her own taste for complexity and write what she thinks a pious public wants. And yet, in spite of the fact that her "good" characters are relentlessly perfect and the events they undergo bear out the moral that wicked choices lead people to bad ends, moral complexity still seems to peek out from the underbrush, because Austen can't entirely suppress her urge to understand people and show them as the human beings they are, good and bad.

Fanny, our heroine, is a paragon of goodness up close, but when you step back and squint, this girl has issues. She is scared of everything and so humble and deferential and passive that, up until she's confronted with an unwelcome proposal, she seems to have no personality of her own. In this world, the cardinal sin for a woman is to have "independence of spirit," and Fanny avoids this sin, until she doesn't - moral conflict alert! To be a good woman, you have to lack this quality, but to follow your conscience in the face of obstacles, you have to have it ... so complexity sneakily sidles into the story.

Edmund, our hero, is also perfect, but then he isn't, because he's so drawn to a woman who's actually interesting and lively and flawed and conflicted and complicated and intelligent - Mary Crawford. Mary, for all her faults of being materialistic and manipulative and too often lacking empathy, is my favorite character, because she unapologetically has this forbidden independence of spirit, reads interesting books, and is the most three-dimensional character in terms of being an obvious mixed bag of good and bad qualities. Mary is quintessentially irreligious. Fanny is shocked and appalled when Mary admits to (gasp!) finding Edmund physically attractive and not just spiritually hot. For Edmund, the dealbreaker comes when Mary fails to condemn a pair of sinners for sinning, and instead judges them to be just dumb and catastrophically imprudent. Austen is rather forgiving of Mary's tendency to be so forgiving, and punishes her in the end with nothing much worse than a life that continues to be complicated and interesting.

And then there's Sir Thomas, the most upstanding of fathers, who nonetheless clearly has a tendency to kind of depress the people he lives with and creates a strict and gloomy atmosphere - not to mention the casually dropped reference to his possible involvement in the slave trade. At the end, sort of astonishingly, he engages in some thoughtful reflection on the harms he may have done with his rigid parenting style. So you can definitely see Austen's puritanical mask cracking.

So, I think my verdict comes down on really liking this book with its subtle contradictions in the midst of its seeming heavy-handed piety. ...more

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Oct 10, 2019 Melissa rated it really liked it

This was an enjoyable book to listen to on a long, boring drive. There were three beautiful sisters. One married an affluent man, Sir Thomas Bertram, who in turn arranged a marriage for the second sister with his friend, Mr Norris, a clergyman. The third sister decided to marry a heavy-drinking and brash navy Lieutenant, Lt Price, and ended up with 9+ children and miserable living conditions in Portsmouth.

Mrs Norris and Mrs Bertram decide to offer a home to the oldest of their sister's many chi ...more

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Aug 18, 2018 Anindyta rated it really liked it

Shelves: owned, tbr-reading-challenge

I was really delighted to read Austen for it must be more than a year since I read her works. No need to describe it long, but Mansfield Park is again about matrimony. I find this always be the case at Jane Austen books, but I only read four of them so I can’t say that I’m Austen-expert, but seems to me all of the topic is about matrimony. In this case, it’s more matrimony and that one sided love (being famous for friendzone term)

But it’s always something special about this author that I cannot I was really delighted to read Austen for it must be more than a year since I read her works. No need to describe it long, but Mansfield Park is again about matrimony. I find this always be the case at Jane Austen books, but I only read four of them so I can’t say that I’m Austen-expert, but seems to me all of the topic is about matrimony. In this case, it’s more matrimony and that one sided love (being famous for friendzone term)

But it’s always something special about this author that I cannot put it down. Even when I had a few hard times to swallow passage by passage back then, I still went on completing it. Austen, for me, tells so much more than only women lit in her generation.

In this book, Austen tells about the sensible, moral, but secluded, quiet and shy Fanny Price who stands by her opinion no matter what everybody tell her, even her cousin, Edmund, who she loves the most and secretly loves beyond brother-sister feeling. There is a man named Henry Crawford, who is a badboy, who professed his love to her. In here, I found Fanny is quite difficult main character, because all of this quiet things she done, being the listener and all, she is not shining like Elizabeth, Emma, Elinor, or Marianne and a bit frustrating. But in the end, I like her quiet character, I adore her ability to be a good listener AND adviser, and I love how she stands to her opinion.

Aside from Fanny, I have a love – hate situation with other characters too. Like Edmund for example (who didn’t have an Edmund in their life though :sigh) he’s a little bit blinded by the liveliness and dashing beautiful woman, isn’t he ? And of course there is other like Mr. and Miss Crawford who’s kind of my favorite because this two make this book alive by their shallow, funny, and interesting opinion. I can’t imagine if this book is only featured Fanny and Edmund.

Anyway, Austen shows us that the quiet and shy woman has something more than she can show. Not to forget about the fact that I always get wonderstruck how people at that era has so much patient in everything. Anyway, I love this one, come as a little dull at first but become one of books that I really enjoyed for the year. Again, Austen shows me that a feminism is not always being the girl who can fight around or being in the deadly games dystopia. Feminism comes for every other woman with many characters and generations and it’s not starting with the hates for the other gender. ...more

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