The Day x Connell Guides - The Connell Guide to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Few novels have divided readers more, or been more misunderstood, than Mansfield Park. Its lonely heroine, Fanny Price, has been traduced as “a human sea anemone”, “a frozen block of timidity” and “a dreary, debilitated, priggish goody-goody”. Yet discerning contemporary critics see Fanny as no mere picture of goodness but as a passionate figure, conflicted by desire, while the novel in which she features is now much more widely, seen as perhaps the most ironic of Austen’s works – and one which, far from being a straightforward defence of the conservative way of life, questions the whole patriarchal basis of the society in which Fanny lives .