In less than a minute, Fanny goes from a thrill of pleasure that Edmund is not staying at the parsonage with Mary Crawford, and will actually be walking home at her side, then, she feels rejected and left out because Edmund is invited to dinner right in front of her (she feels alarmed and jealous as well because it means he’ll be spending an evening in Mary Crawford’s company,) but when, a second later, the invitation is extended to her, she is so overcome and nervous that she plunges into her most unbecoming trait—everyone must stand around and wait while Fanny Price wallows in humility. The momentous question: “Should Fanny eat dinner with the neighbours?” is finally referred to Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram to decide on her behalf.
Alas, when Fanny Price does actually speak, as opposed to stammering, I don’t like her any better. Her soliloquies in praise of nature sound faintly ridiculous and pompous to me, [The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen!].
I can only view her with sympathy by considering that she grew up in a very isolated setting and doesn’t understand how to make ordinary small talk. Who else, when asked, “You have been here a month, I think?” would answer: “No, not quite a month. It is only four weeks tomorrow since I left Mansfield.”
“You are a most accurate and honest reckoner,” (responds Henry Crawford.) “I should call that a month.”
“I did not arrive here till Tuesday evening.”
And what lover would persist in the face of this, if this is a foretaste of the domestic conversation he’ll be enduring for the rest of his life?
Podcaster Kristen (of the Jane Austen fandom podcast “First Impressions”) who has boldly declared Mansfield Park “the best novel ever published,” points out that Fanny Price clearly suffers from social anxiety disorder, a common and surely a forgivable problem. She prefers to sit and listen and in fact has a dread of being the centre of attention, which places her at a disadvantage in being the heroine of a novel.
Although I don’t loathe Fanny Price as many others do, my beef with her as a heroine is that she is never tempted to do other than what she does.* A person who is never tempted to get drunk is not more virtuous than the alcoholic who must resist the urge to drink. A person who is never tempted to gluttony is not more virtuous than the plump person turning away from the buffet table. Fanny has no inner struggle to overcome. She must withstand the outside pressures upon her, especially the pressure to marry Henry Crawford, to stay true to her own beliefs.
And so, in re-reading Mansfield Park over the years, I have been tempted to “tweak” Fanny just a bit. This book came about because I was unexpectedly and suddenly inspired by two particular passages; firstly, when Henry Crawford wishes that “a steady contrary wind” across the Atlantic had prevented Sir Thomas Bertram from returning home so that the young people could have continued staging Lovers' Vows, and secondly, a truly shocking moment when Aunt Norris (“one of the most plausibly odious characters in fiction,” Tony Tanner calls her) insults Fanny in front of everyone: “I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful, girl... considering who and what she is.”
I asked myself, what if Fanny broke away from the truly—to use the modern phrase—dysfunctional situation she’s living in? What if Aunt Norris’s remark was the straw that broke the camel’s back? And what if Sir Thomas had been held back by a contrary wind? And finally, what if Fanny was tempted, truly tempted, to do something that was against her strict moral code? What would tempt her? How would the story have unfolded differently?
In A Contrary Wind, I started out with making those three variations, placed the characters in motion, and let their actions and interactions play out.
*There is a suggestion that in time, she might relent and marry Henry Crawford, but I for one, feel Crawford was kidding himself; he was in love, briefly, with the idea of being in love, and Fanny is right—they are too dissimilar to ever work as a couple. One can’t imagine the high-spirited Henry Crawford being happy with Fanny.
Acknowledgements and References
I wish to thank Jane Austen! What more can be said of her, and of her genius?
A big thank you to my son Joseph Manning for acting as my editor. To switch back to 18th century mode for a moment—his keen eye and his helpful interjections, uniting as they did intelligence, sympathy and wit, rendered an otherwise tedious task more than supportable even though my toleration for lengthy sentences and plentiful commas somewhat exceeds his.
Thanks also to my sister Cara Elrod for reading an early draft and providing helpful comments on the plot and characters.
Thanks to Tim Barber of Dissect Designs for designing my new cover. Tim, you were a pleasure to work with.
I established a calendar for A Contrary Wind with the help of Ellen Moody’s calendar for Mansfield Park.
The following books were very helpful to my research of the period:
Jack Tar: Life in Nelson's Navy by Roy & Lesley Adkins, 2009
Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England: How our ancestors lived two centuries ago, Roy & Lesley Adkins, 2014.
His Majesty’s Ship,
