Lucilla Stanley, the heroine of Coelebs, is modest, retiring, hides her intelligence and her education, is demure in company, fastidious, charitable, and devout. The hero says of her, “of repartee she has little, and dislikes it in others.” (Mary Crawford wouldn’t be welcome in the Stanley household!) Like Fanny, she blushes if anyone so much as looks at her. Like Fanny, she is tender-hearted.
Yet, when Edmund urges Fanny to “be the perfect model of a woman which I have always believed you born for,” and accept Henry Crawford’s marriage proposal, she refuses: “Oh! never, never, never! he never will succeed with me.” She is answering to a higher principle by refusing to marry a man she can neither love nor respect.
Another startling difference between Mansfield Park and Coelebs and Two Cousins, is that in the conduct novels, someone (a neglectful husband and a spoilt girl, respectively) is saved from their dissolute ways by the steadfast Christian example of a virtuous person. But as Professor Mary Waldron pointed out, “Mansfield Park deliberately rejects this stereotype; good example fails to avert a shipwreck.” Henry Crawford explicitly asks Fanny for advice and guidance when he visits her in Portsmouth, and she refuses him:
“I advise! You know very well what is right,” (says Fanny.)
“Yes. When you give me your opinion, I always know what is right. Your judgment is my rule of right.”
“Oh, no! do not say so. We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be. Good-bye; I wish you a pleasant journey to-morrow.”
That short exchange, Professor Waldron writes, is “the pivot upon which the novel finally hums towards its calamitous conclusion.”
Henry goes to London and starts flirting again with Maria, rather than going to his estate and sorting out his corrupt manager; leading to, says Waldron, the “almost unmitigated disaster of the ending,” with severe consequences for Maria Bertram Rushworth, and Edmund and Fanny marry, and a great many readers of Mansfield Park left unsatisfied and unconvinced.
Perhaps Jane Austen rejected the idea of Fanny ‘saving’ Henry Crawford as unrealistic. Perhaps she thought Henry Crawford was responsible for saving himself.
In conclusion, some familiarity with conduct books and conduct novels helps us understand the context in which Mansfield Park was written. I think the evidence is strong that Austen intended to write a new type of conduct novel; one with real, believable characters struggling with moral dilemmas and with an actual plot, rather than a series of parables or anecdotes.
In Mansfield Park, Austen knew she had written something important, something different, something rich and complex, and she was disappointed with the lack of response to it. Certainly Mansfield Park didn’t challenge the sales of the conduct novels. No newspapers or journals reviewed it, unlike her previous novels.
But today, even as the least-popular of her novels, Mansfield Park has acquired a fame and immortality greater than all of the conduct novels of her day, put together.
More Reading:
Waldron, Mary. “The Frailties of Fanny: Mansfield Park and the Evangelical Movement,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1994): 259–81
A Synopsis of Mansfield Park
A brief synopsis of Mansfield Park is provided here for anyone who hasn’t read this great novel. A Contrary Wind and A Marriage of Attachment can be read without having read Mansfield Park, but I recommend that you read Austen’s powerful, subtle, and beautifully written novel. My novels frequently reference scenes and dialogue in the original novel, so knowledge of the original will enhance the enjoyment of my variations.
Sir Thomas Bertram is a wealthy baronet with four handsome children, two girls and two boys. His estate, Mansfield Park, is in Northamptonshire, north of London. His wife was one of three sisters—she made a brilliant marriage when she snagged the baronet; her older sister, Mrs. Norris, married the neighbourhood clergyman. The third sister, Mrs. Price, married beneath her; she wed a lieutenant of marines and lives in squalor in Portsmouth with her husband, now disabled for active duty, and a large brood of children.
Mrs. Norris proposes to Sir Thomas that he take in one of the poor Price children to help that struggling family (this is so she may have the credit of being benevolent without any of the expense); he agrees, and awkward, timid little Fanny Price, aged ten, comes to live in the great mansion. She is overawed by everything and everyone, and only her cousin Edmund, the younger of the two Bertram boys, pays any attention to her or shows her kindness.
Lady Bertram is remarkable for her indolence and inactivity, so by default, the management of her household and the raising of her children has been taken up by Mrs. Norris, childless and widowed, who is a judgmental, self-important, miserly busybody. Fanny is particularly bullied by Aunt Norris. The novel shows us numerous scenes in which Fanny is established as the Cinderella of the household. Fanny is shy, humble and passive, but she is also very morally upright. Thanks to Edmund, she learns to love poetry and reading, and becomes an enthusiast for the sublimity of Nature. She grows up to be totally devoted to him and secretly in love. (This was at a time when first cousins could marry each other).
Sir Thomas must leave Mansfield Park to attend to his “plantations” in Antigua (that is, he is a slave-owner who owns sugar plantations, a very considerable source of wealth for England at this time) and he is away for almost two years. During his absence, his oldest daughter, Maria, becomes engaged to the wealthy but dim-witted Mr. Rushworth, who owns a large estate known as Sotherton. Then two new characters appear—pretty, witty and charming Mary Crawford, and her flirtatious brother Henry. They are the half-brother and half-sister of Mrs. Grant,
