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    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"
    Ebook51 pages28 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A study guide for Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535826396
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park" - Gale

      09

      Mansfield Park

      Jane Austen

      1814

      Introduction

      Mansfield Park, written between 1811 and 1813 and published in 1814, was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be begun after she attained professional success as a writer, rather than being a revision of work begun many years before. It is therefore among her most mature and sophisticated pieces and the one which has drawn the most varied critical and popular responses. The main character, Fanny Price, is a sort of Cinderella who grows from a child to a woman, and above all to a morally mature and autonomous individual, while in the care of indifferent, even hostile, relatives. Fanny's careful moral evaluations of her circumstances and acquaintances have been seen either as priggishness or as a triumph of inner strength against the vicissitudes of life. Of all Austen's works, Mansfield Park has been of the most interest to postmodernists, scholars, and filmmakers alike, all seeking to interrogate Austen's world from the viewpoint of their own contemporary moral orthodoxies, especially in regard to the issue of slavery. The plot and structure of the novel are by far the most ambitious of all Austen's books. She revisits the world of myth and fairy tale, to a large extent basing characters and circumstances on the popular contemporary play Lovers' Vows, in which the characters in their turn stage a production. This complex interaction between frameworks of reality and fiction is rarely seen in stories by Austen's contemporaries or predecessors, being more typical of twentieth-century writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Ingmar Bergman.

      Author Biography

      Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in the small village of Steventon in Hampshire, in the south of England. Her father, George Austen, came from a wealthy manufacturing family that had provided for him by buying him a position in the Church of England as the rector in Steventon, a job that included income from agricultural rents. As happens in many of Austen's novels, this left him with the problem of arranging advantageous marriages or other livelihoods for his children (six sons and two daughters, all of whom, unusually, survived to adulthood), to whom he could not expect to leave any sizable inheritance. During the Christmas and New Year's holidays of 1796-1797, Austen experienced the first of two romantic attachments. Her flirtation with Tom Lefroy, a young lawyer, was immediately stopped by both families because neither Tom nor Jane had any income to support a household. Six years later Austen received a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, a friend of the family with a very large income whose marriage to Jane would have secured the financial future of the entire Austen family. Probably for this reason she initially accepted, but she backed out the next day. No definite information about her refusal survives, but it is often conjectured to have come about because of her unwillingness to compromise her personal feelings.

      By the end of 1785 Jane and her sister Cassandra had completed a finishing school where they studied such then-typically feminine accomplishments as French and needlework. Jane acquired a more serious education under the direction of her father (who had a degree from Oxford) in his extensive library. During the 1780s and 1790s the Austens spent much of their spare time performing amateur theatricals for their own amusement. Jane

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