Website that has lots of information about Austen, her historical context, and all of her novels. The site has information on Jane Austen, the book's historical context, images from the movie, and resources and links for further study. This page also talks about some of the poems featured in the book, as well as the featured play Lovers' Vows.Įxtensive website for the 2007 Masterpiece Classic movie.
This website contains the text of the book online and also has some basic information on the novel. Interestingly, this novel can also be seen as a precursor to Austen's later novels like Emma and Persuasion, both of which contain highly complex characters and deal with contemporary events and serious social issues. Antagonists act more like heroes, heroines are sometimes unsympathetic, and villains suddenly transform into protagonists. Yet, typical to Austen's writing, the characters in Mansfield Park are often very real: they're difficult and contradictory and confusing and unclassifiable. No one really seems to understand one another, and few people even make an effort to try and understand those around them. Nearly everyone in Mansfield Park spends the book making faulty assumptions about other people. It's good to try to read Mansfield Park without preconceptions or assumptions, which is actually one of the major themes of the book. So what's going on with this novel? It seems downright un-Austen at times.
In addition, Mansfield Park explores some serious issues (like religion, slavery, politics) much more directly than Austen's previous works. Mansfield Park's heroine isn't nearly as charming and spunky. The first of its relatively funny traits (for Austen) is that the heroine's main rival in Mansfield Park seems to a lot in common with the beloved heroine of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett. This novel was a pretty big departure from Austen's other works, and it was a bit of a shock coming after the much more light-hearted Pride and Prejudice, which was published just one year prior. Hitting the shelves in 1814, Mansfield Park was the third novel that Jane Austen published and the fourth that she completed.
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