https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/books/review/jane-austen-mansfield-park.html Skip to contentSkip to site index Book Review|Jane Austen's Boldest Novel Is Also Her Least Understood https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/books/review/ jane-austen-mansfield-park.html * Share full article * * * 169 You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. This illustration shows the silhouettes of two figures against a blue background. The one on the left, depicting an old man, is far larger and looms over the young woman on the right. Although her posture appears submissive in silhouette, a fully detailed image of her face is tucked inside the silhouette's head, and it stares defiantly at the man. Credit...Diego Mallo Essay Jane Austen's Boldest Novel Is Also Her Least Understood "Mansfield Park" continues to complicate the writer's legacy 250 years after her birth. Lauren Groff explains how the novel's dark themes and complex ironies help keep Austen weird. Credit...Diego Mallo Supported by SKIP ADVERTISEMENT * Share full article * * * 169 By Lauren Groff Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the best-selling author of seven works of fiction, including most recently the novel "The Vaster Wilds." This essay is adapted from her introduction to a new edition of "Mansfield Park," to be published by Vintage Books next month. * Published June 27, 2025Updated June 30, 2025, 2:15 p.m. ET "Mansfield Park" is, by far, the strangest of Jane Austen's novels. In juxtaposition to the merry and major key orchestrations of her four better-known novels, "Pride and Prejudice," "Sense and Sensibility," "Persuasion" and "Emma," Austen's third published book sings in a decidedly minor key. The other novels are not the romances that film studios so often mistake them for -- they are, instead, clever and cogent satires on societal mores -- but since they are written in the major key, they can seem "too light & bright & sparkling," as Austen herself once said jokingly in a letter about "Pride and Prejudice." Compared with the others, it's true that "Mansfield Park" can appear too dark & dim & lugubrious. Perhaps this is why, for most of my life as a reader, I resisted it and thought of it as the one flaw in her otherwise four-carat, marquise-cut oeuvre. In time, however, I've come to see "Mansfield Park" as her boldest, riskiest, most subversive and most artistically mature work of all. A big assertion! True; "Mansfield Park" is a big book. For one thing, it's the only one of Austen's novels that takes place on a large canvas, over the course of a decade or so, while the others flash by in from one to three years. For another, while all of Austen's books are deeply invested in moral questions, her third book is entirely built around the ideal of deep, serious moral purpose, which drives the plot; serious moral purpose is what lends the novel its solemn, melancholy flavor; serious moral purpose happens to be the primary, and perhaps sole, heroic attribute of our protagonist, Fanny Price. Poor Fanny. Unlike so many of Austen's young women, she is neither a great beauty, nor a wealthy heiress, nor witty, nor charming; her cousin Tom calls her a "creepmouse" and she does tend to twitch and scuttle, physically feeble and gray, around the corners of the room. To onlookers who, unlike the reader, are not privy to her interior life, she has only one really compelling quality: an aunt who had the astonishing luck 30 years earlier to have married a wealthy baronet, Sir Thomas Bertram. Another aunt, a parsimonious busybody, married a Reverend Norris, and Fanny's own mother rather too hastily married one Price, a lieutenant of marines, who has become an out-of-work heavy drinker by the time we meet him. To her great misfortune, soon after her marriage, Mrs. Price has nine children in 11 years, with not nearly enough money to support them, and in desperation she agitates for a rapprochement among the sisters, and the rich Bertram family at last deigns to help. Thus, the oldest Price girl, Fanny, is plucked from her pack of siblings and, at 10 years old, largely unlettered, hypersensitive and extremely timid, the girl is thrust into the life of Mansfield Park, a great estate in the country. Out of nowhere, this child raised in roughness is elevated to a class so far from her own that she feels terrified all the time, and is told in every possible way that she is worthless by her nasty, domineering Aunt Norris. Next to Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet or even Anne Elliot from "Persuasion" (who is perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of Austen's heroines), Fanny Price indeed looks a little wan and thin, a bit of a party-pooper, mulishly unwilling to join in the fun when the superego of the estate, Sir Thomas, is away on his property in Antigua and the young people of the household decide to put on a play. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe. 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