The Connell Guide to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Few novels have divided critics more than Mansfield Park.It has been fiercely argued over for more than 200 years, and with good reason: it is open to radically different interpretations.At its broadest, it is a novel about the condition of England, setting up an opposition, as the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin has put it, between someone with strongly held religious and moral principles who will not consider a marriage that is not based on true feeling, and is revolted by sexual immorality, and "a group of worldly, highly cultivated, entertaining and well-to-do young people who pursue pleasure without regard for religious or moral principles".Many have dismissed the heroine, Fanny Price, as a mere picture of goodness, but the author of this guide, John Wiltshire, one of the most respected and original of modern Austen critics, dismisses this argument. "The still, principled fulcrum of moral right, celebrated and excoriated by earlier critics," he says, is now "understood to be a tr