There is very little plot or action; most of the novel consists of long conversations dominated by wise, pious Mr. Stanley, (the father of the girl who will marry Charles) and he is preoccupied with the virtues and vices of his neighbours, his acquaintances, and his daughters, and how everyone ought to live their lives and raise their children.
So, just imagine: you are Jane Austen, your books have sold well, but not spectacularly, and you have read Coelebs, because your sister Cassandra recommended it, and you know it sold like hotcakes, and you think, between snorts of derision and eye-rolling, “I can do better than this!”
Professor Mary Waldron and other scholars have argued that Mansfield Park is the answer to Coelebs in Search of a Wife and other conduct novels. Understanding the genre of the “conduct book” and the “conduct novel,” helps us to understand Mansfield Park, and understand why Austen’s third published novel is significantly different from her other works.
It was once a truth universally acknowledged that parents had a moral duty to raise their children to be industrious, virtuous, charitable, and pious, and that doing so would prepare their offspring for a happy and useful life on earth and salvation thereafter.
Parents were expected to examine and develop the character and personality traits of their children. For example, Austen’s parents said of their daughters: ‘Cassandra had the merit of having her temper always under command, but that Jane had the happiness of a temper that never required to be commanded.’”
Or we may recall Mrs. Morland in Northanger Abbey, afraid that her daughter Catherine has “been spoilt for home by great acquaintance,” because of her time in Bath. She hurries upstairs to find an improving essay in The Mirror, “anxious to lose no time in attacking so dreadful a malady.” Parents like Mrs. Morland would often turn to written essays with which to exhort their children.
A conduct book, such as Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women, with which Mr. Collins bores Lydia in Pride & Prejudice, was typically a book of essays, sometimes written in letter form, giving advice on how to conduct one’s life. The topics included good manners, education, forming friendships, courtship and so on.
Other examples of popular conduct books for young ladies are: Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies, by Hannah More, and A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, by Dr. John Gregory. These books were best-sellers. No doubt they were often purchased by older relations and godparents for the young girls in their lives. Perhaps they were gifted more often than they were actually read, but at any rate, Hannah More died a wealthy woman!
While we are don’t read these conduct books today, young ladies of the long eighteenth century, such as Jane Austen, were quite familiar with them. She pokes fun at their serious tone with Mary Bennet in Pride & Prejudice:
“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
We know that when Mary is speaking, her sisters—Kitty and Lydia at least—are rolling their eyes.
Mary might have gotten her ideas from Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady by Hester Chapone, which explains that “pride is a high opinion of oneself,” while vanity is to be anxious for “the admiration of others.”
A conduct novel like Coelebs takes the moral lessons of the conduct book and places them into the mouths of characters in a novel, who embody various virtues, vices and sins. Coelebs marries Dr. Stanley’s virtuous daughter at the end of the novel.
In another conduct novel, The Two Cousins, by Elizabeth Pinchard (1798), a spoilt young city cousin comes to live with her intelligent, good-hearted and virtuous country cousin, and is reformed.
Unlike Coelebs or Two Cousins, Mansfield Park is a conduct novel which tells its moral lessons in a realistic setting with exquisite prose and compelling dialogue. And, unlike the conduct novels in which the characters are little more than animated points of view, a device with which to address the reader, Mansfield Park’s characters are unique and well-rounded. Lady Bertram neglects the upbringing of her children and Mrs. Norris is an avaricious, judgmental, busybody. Maria Bertram marries a man she doesn’t love. Henry Crawford tries to reform himself and win Fanny’s love, but falls back in to his old seductive ways. Edmund Bertram, for a time, is beguiled by the witty but superficial Mary Crawford.
There are some passages in Austen which echo some of the popular conduct novels. In The Two Cousins, there is a scene where the virtuous mother and her young daughter talk over the rude language of a spoilt little girl at a dinner party. “Oh indeed yes, Mama,” exclaims little Constantia. “I was quite astonished to hear Miss Selwyn use such an expression!”
After a dinner party at Mansfield Park, Edmund and Fanny discuss Mary Crawford:
“But was there nothing in her conversation that struck you, Fanny, as not quite right?”
“Oh yes! she ought not to have spoken of her uncle as she did. I was quite astonished.”
Elsewhere, the loving mother of The Two Cousins advises her niece: “Own your conviction, my dear Alicia, and you
