Mr. Gibson, as all the world knows, became a literary lion with the publication of his book describing his adventures in fighting the slave trade. Subsequently he became a celebrated author of novels, which were unlike anything else offered to the public, for they described life in a fantastic future, where the monotonous but necessary chores needed to support civilized life were all performed by steam-powered machines, and thereby, slavery was no more!
This story, as it closes, will not pretend to foretell so far into the distant future but will offer a few glimpses of the immediate years ahead:
Julia Bertram, fond of activity, and missing the gardens of Mansfield Park, carried on with the plans for Thornton Lacey as delineated by Henry Crawford, and superintended the establishment of a small garden on the south-eastern slope beside the parsonage, a project which occupied several years, and which brought her great satisfaction.
When her son was three years old, Maria Crawford took a house in London, where her beauty and wealth brought her many admirers, and it was generally believed that a second, and more successful, marriage would be her eventual reward for atoning for the one great error of her youth. Of her own free will, she brought little Henry to London to meet his great-uncle, the Admiral, who was charmed into acknowledging the dark-haired, clever, lively boy as a Crawford.
As for Edmund’s estranged wife, she was often to be seen at Bath or at Brighton, a member of the Prince of Wales’ set, in the company of her good friend the Earl of Elsham. Her beauty and wit ensured that she was a favourite, and although she kept her fortune, as Edmund refused to make a claim on it, she also retained all her bitter regrets.
Of all of the principals in this story, the one most often to contemplate ‘what if,’ was Edmund Bertram, whose most important decision—his choice of a wife—turned out to have such unhappy consequences. He blessed the suffering that made him more compassionate of others, the adage about the mote and the beam was always on his lips, but he could not help asking himself of an evening, while looking into the fire, what would have happened if that contrary wind across the Atlantic had not prevented his father’s ship from arriving home in time to stop the rehearsals of Lovers' Vows, or how might events have unfolded differently if Fanny had not left home, early that October morning?
Foreword or Afterword
For my part, I like Mansfield Park best. I recognize that its heroine is a little prig and its hero a pompous ass, but I do not care; it is wise, witty and tender, a masterpiece of ironical humour and subtle observation.
— Somerset Maugham
I usually just skim the forewords, don’t you? Or read the first few paragraphs, then skip on ahead to chapter one, feeling a bit lazy or guilty. To spare you, gentle reader, from the faintest whisper of self-reproach, I leave it to your inclination. Please feel free to read this before, after, or even not at all.
I’ve been a Jane Austen devotee ever since my mother introduced Pride & Prejudice to me, and on one memorable Christmas she gave me a complete Penguin set of her books. Over the years, I have read and re-read Austen’s six novels, sometimes to find consolation in a distressed hour, but mostly because she left us only six novels, plus two fragments and her juvenilia, before her untimely death.
For years, I thought about writing an ending to one of Austen’s two unfinished novels—this was before the internet—and before Colin Firth’s dive into a pond in 1995—when Austen fan fiction really exploded. But I discovered that it was Mansfield Park I returned to, and re-read and thought about the most. But why, considering that—in common with Jane Austen’s mother, I find Fanny Price an “insipid” heroine?
Fanny Price, as anyone familiar with Jane Austen and her works knows, is the least popular of all the Austen heroines. Largely because of Fanny, “Mansfield Park is the least favourite novel of the six,” as Lorraine Clark, Associate Professor of English at Trent University in Ontario, acknowledges. “And yet the pleasures of Mansfield Park get deeper, and deeper and deeper on re-reading…. There’s a quiet, contemplative, meditative pleasure.”
I’ll return to Fanny in a minute. She will wait right there on the bench for us, deeply anxious and unhappy, no doubt, but uncomplaining.
Dr. Mary Breen, University College Cork, says “many critics believe [Mansfield Park is] the first great English novel….” and I believe this is not just because of Austen’s brilliant and subtle handling of the interactions of the characters through their dialogue, but because Austen is writing in a more somber and assured voice. There are a few passages in which I think I glimpse the emergence of new and even more powerful descriptive abilities, such as the following, when Austen describes the heroine sitting in the tiny, grimy parlour of her parents’ home in Portsmouth:
[Fanny] was deep in other musing. The remembrance of her first evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper, came across her. No candle was now wanted. The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon. She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there; and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy, for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its
