Mansfield Park, Jane Austen - Nina Auerbach (essay date 1983)
Nina Auerbach (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: “Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price,” in Jane Austen: New Perspectives, edited by Janet Todd, Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1983, pp. 208-23.
[In the following essay, Auerbach considers Fanny Price as a version of the Romantic monster.]
Alone among masters of fiction, Jane Austen commands the woman's art of making herself loved. She knows how to enchant us with conversational sparkle, to charm our assent with a glow of description, to entice our smiles with the coquette's practiced glee. No major novelist is such an adept at charming. Samuel Richardson, her greatest predecessor, disdained gentlemanly amenities in his revelations of the mind's interminable, intractable mixture of motives when it engages itself in duels of love; George Eliot, her mightiest successor, rejected charm as an opiate distracting us from the harsh realities her knobby, convoluted...
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