SOURCE: “The Novelist as Heroine in Mansfield Park: A Study in Autobiography,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, June, 1983, pp. 136-56.

Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's Vanity Fair. Almost everyone in it is selfish—self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and vain. This helps make it her most unpleasant novel—and her most controversial. For years critics have exercised themselves trying to explain, justify, expound, or attack its moral slant. Misreadings of the book by otherwise sensible men and women are legion: Mansfield Park “continually and essentially holds up the vicious as admirable,” says Kingsley Amis.¹ Commentators complacently discuss the expulsion of wit and scourging of irony in Mansfield Park, pronounce Fanny Price a failure, and conclude that the novel as a whole must be one too. The book is supposed somehow to be “different”—not at all, really, Jane Austen's sort of thing, and thus requiring a good deal of explanation.

This is nonsense. Mansfield Park is very much of a piece with her other books, and in fact it is one of the best of them. It is also, as we shall see, one of her most autobiographical volumes. No doubt because of its apparent complexity, more has been written about it than any of the other works.

Like Pride and Prejudice, which preceded it into print by only a year, Mansfield Park (1814) is largely about true and false values, right and wrong ways of looking at things—how to live, in short. “Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure,” declares Mary Crawford.² In this, as in everything else she says and does, Mary (as well as her brother Henry) is wrong. Like Becky Sharp (and Milton's Satan), she is more lively and amusing than many of her fellow players. But, as in Thackeray's novel (and Milton's poem), the author's moral perspective on false values never wavers. “Miss Crawford, in spite of some amiable sensations, and much personal kindness, had still been Miss Crawford, still shewn a mind led astray and bewildered, and without any suspicion of being so; darkened, yet fancying itself light” (p. 367), the narrator remarks late in the story; Edmund observes of Mary, ultimately, that she lacks “the most valuable knowledge we could any of us acquire—the knowledge of ourselves” (p. 459). “Her mind was entirely self-engrossed” (p. 358), the narrator says of Mary. It is indicative that when Fanny remarks to Mary, “One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy,” Mary should reply, “To say the truth … I see no wonder in [nature] equal to seeing myself in it” (pp. 209-10). Henry Crawford is described as subject to “the freaks of a cold-blooded vanity” (p. 467); “entangled by his own vanity” (p. 468); a victim of “the temptation of immediate pleasure”; and “unused to make any sacrifice to right” (p. 467). Dr. Grant's great fault, it is obvious, is lack of self-knowledge. Everyone at Mansfield is, to quote a well-known passage in the novel, “shut up, or wholly occupied each with the person … dependant on them … for every thing” (p. 449).

Of course vice is alluring: it is supposed to be. But we perceive Mary as odious throughout. She and her brother may be more interesting than Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram—more fun at a dinner party—but we know that immorality can be more seductive and fascinating than virtue. And certainly it is easier, often enough, to mock propriety than attempt to understand it, as Stuart Tave has said in what is perhaps the best essay on Mansfield Park.³ He goes on to remind us that what the Crawfords really represent is “liveliness without life” (p. 165); they are foils to the less “lively,” but more virtuous, protagonists. That virtue may be duller than vice need not require us to be vicious. Jane Austen hints at something like this in the final chapter, when the narrator comments that “the public punishment of disgrace … is … not one of the barriers, which society gives to virtue. In this world, the penalty is less equal than could be wished …” (p. 468).

Mansfield Park is not nearly so complicated a book as many have thought. Fanny Price, looking on and listening, “not unamused to observe the selfishness which, more or less disguised, seemed to govern them all, and wondering how it would end” (p. 131), stands in for Jane Austen here. True, the light and bright and sparkling Elizabeth Bennet has gone away. Too much time has passed; the novelist cannot possibly be the same person. Her view of things inevitably is different from what it was in the relatively cheerful 1790s, when Pride and Prejudice (then called “First Impressions”) was initially drafted. But Fanny Price is as much a part of Jane Austen's personality as Elizabeth Bennet; and it is this, perhaps, that many critics have not wanted to see or admit. A few have recognized that Mansfield Park is no “sport” among the books. “Can we doubt that [Fanny's] is Jane Austen's own position, that even when the self is alone and unsupported by human example of approval, it must still imperatively act in accordance with what is ‘right,’ must still support what is valid in its moral inheritance?” Alistair M. Duckworth asks.⁴ “There can be no stability of life, no certainty of conduct, without principles of action, a matter of continual importance to Dr. Johnson as to Jane Austen,” Tave reminds us (p. 178). It is always Fanny who sees what the others are up to when they themselves do not understand their own actions. It is she who has the strength of character here—dull or not. “The novel … is designed to vindicate Fanny Price and the values for which she stands,” as Bernard J. Paris rightly says.⁵ Fanny's “judgment may be quite … safely trusted” (p. 147), Edmund declares. We need not love her in order to see that her moral perspective is the most strictly focused one in Mansfield Park. “If you are against me, I ought to distrust myself” (p. 155), Edmund remarks to Fanny over the business of the theatricals. Indeed he should. Later he tells his father: “Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout, who has been consistent” (p. 187).

Those who believe that “there is no clearly discernible irony hedging off what [the characters] say from what their author is apparently saying”⁶ are surely wrong. And because so many readers have felt this way, the point here about the consistency and clarity of the novel's moral slant must be all the more emphatically made. Nor is Mansfield Park in any way a falling-off from the high standard set by preceding works. Newman, incidentally, is known to have read this book once a year “to preserve his style.”⁷

Fanny's moral focus is so consistently before us because it is that of Jane Austen. Let us consider the autobiographical resonances of a novel so often said to be uncharacteristic of its author.

Fanny Price has a sailor brother who, after some impatient delay, is promoted through family connections—and who brings her a present of jewelry from abroad. Jane Austen's younger brother Charles is the apparent model here; and he actually brought back for his sister, from one of his ocean journeys in 1801, a topaz cross on a gold chain. Like Charles Austen, William Price loves to dance. William tends to write long, chatty letters to Fanny; both of Jane Austen's sailor brothers, Charles and Francis, wrote to her, but not as often as she would have liked—there may be some wish fulfillment here. “I cannot rate so very highly the love or good nature of a brother, who will not give himself the trouble of writing any thing worth reading, to his sisters, when they are separated” (p. 64), Fanny declares. William is also more generous about distributing his prize money to his relations than either of Jane Austen's sailor brothers ever was: the unspoken reproach may be inferred. Much is said in this book about the advantages “for a lad who, before he was twenty, had gone through … bodily hardships, and given … proofs of mind” (p. 236). Mansfield Park extols the virtue “of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance” (p. 236). In the course of the book the names of several of Francis Austen's ships are used in passing (e.g., the Endymion, the Elephant, the Cleopatra). The novelist wrote to her brother to ask his permission to use these names; he replied that she was welcome to do so, though he thought this might endanger her anonymity as a novelist.⁸ Mr. Price's description of exactly how the Thrush lies in harbor at Spithead (p. 380) is so technical and nautically exact that we may be certain it was drafted for Jane Austen by her brother Francis, who was staying at Chawton when this section of Mansfield Park was written.

Between the sisters (Maria and Julia) there is sibling rivalry in love matters more spectacular than in any of the earlier works (with the possible exception of the youthful “Three Sisters”). Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion bristle with rivalry between sisters. The love between siblings, Mansfield Park pointedly reminds us, which is “sometimes almost every thing, is at others worse than nothing” (p. 235). Jane Austen was two years younger than her sister Cassandra; and though the contrary is generally believed, the fact is that they did not always get along. A careful reading of some of the surviving letters Jane wrote to her elder sister makes this plain enough. Indeed, the sisters had a disagreement over the ending of this very novel, as we shall see.

Also we have one mother here (Lady Bertram) who is selfishly heartless, and uninterested in her children—and in everything that does not directly concern herself; and another (Mrs. Price) who virtually ignores a grown-up daughter. Can this be a coincidence? While there may be little of Jane Austen's mother in Lady Bertram, the fact remains that in refusing to “go into public with her daughters” and being “too indolent even to accept a mother's gratification in witnessing their success and enjoyment at the expense of any personal trouble” (p. 35), Lady Bertram undoubtedly recapitulates the reclusive side of Mrs. Austen, who became disinclined while still a healthy woman to leave home for any reason. Of Lady Bertram it is said: “Every thing that a considerate parent ought to feel was advanced for her use; and every thing that an affectionate mother must feel in promoting her children's enjoyment, was attributed to her nature” (p. 285)—falsely, of course, for she feels nothing. The phrasing here is vivid and probably reflects an aspect of Jane Austen's view of her mother. Lady Bertram's “playing at being frightened” (p. 427) in emergencies may represent Mrs. Austen's lifelong hypochondria, which always infuriated her novelist-daughter. The mortification of Fanny at her mother's indifference to her is described by Jane Austen with equally striking vividness: “She had probably alienated Love by the helplessness and fretfulness of a fearful temper, or been unreasonable in wanting a larger share than any one among so many could deserve” (p. 371). The last part of this statement sounds distinctly personal; the Austens, like the Prices, were a large family, and probably there was not enough time for a busy mother laden with household cares to tend to all the needs and desires of a younger daughter. Mrs. Price's “heart and her time were … quite full; she had neither leisure nor affection to bestow on Fanny. Her daughters never had been much to her. She was fond of her sons … her time was given chiefly to her house and her servants” (p. 389). The Austens had six boys and two girls, and throughout her early and middle years Mrs. Austen would have been chiefly concerned with household management. Nor can there be any doubt that she doted on her sons. In Mansfield Park Fanny reflects bitterly that her mother had “no curiosity to know her better, no desire of her friendship, and no inclination for her company” (p. 390). Should we still fail to get the point, the novel makes it plain for us: “Mothers certainly have not yet got quite the right way of managing their daughters … To be neglected before one's time, must be very vexatious … [it is] entirely the mother's fault” (pp. 50-51). Probably Jane Austen was “neglected before [her] time” by her mother; it may go far to explain her hostile nature as an adolescent, her lifelong penchant for satire, and the number of silly and insipid mothers who populate her books. Other instances of her impatience with and resentment of her mother abound in more obvious ways in the novelist's letters; mother and daughter even fought over household expenses. These feelings are articulated here in sublimated ways, but without much artifice. Surely it is indicative that Mrs. Austen, who enjoyed the Dashwood sisters and admired Elizabeth Bennet, is on record as detesting Fanny Price.⁹

And it should be equally clear, though critics have not noticed this, that Fanny's aunt Norris is a highly unflattering likeness of Mrs. Leigh Perrot, the woman who married Jane Austen's mother's brother. Mrs. Norris is a tightfisted aunt who torments a saintly niece—and steals. Mrs. Leigh Perrot was accused of, tried for, and eventually acquitted of stealing some lace from a shop in Bath. There is some evidence to suggest a strain of kleptomania in her, though no particular offense was ever positively proven.¹⁰ In any case, she was no favorite with her husband's family during Jane Austen's lifetime. The Austen ladies were furious, after the death of the novelist's father and during subsequent years, over the prosperous Leigh Perrots' refusal to help any member of the family except the already comfortable James Austen, Jane's eldest brother. Since James Leigh Perrot was both a blood relative and perceived as affectionate and likable, his wife was blamed by the Austens, and considered parsimonious. Jane Austen would never know this, but after her husband's death in 1817 Mrs. Leigh Perrot dealt more generously with the Austen family than he ever had done. That Mrs. Norris is a malicious portrait of the resented aunt of the Austens is obvious. Mrs. Norris on two occasions steals baize from Mansfield Park, eventually winding up with the whole curtain bought for the theatricals secreted away in her own house. After the ball at Mansfield she makes off with “all the supernumerary jellies” (p. 283). As for her impoverished nieces in Portsmouth—Mrs. Price's verdict on her sister undoubtedly reflects the feelings of Mrs. Leigh Perrot's nieces at Bath, Southampton, and Chawton: “Aunt Norris lives too far off, to think of such little people as you” (p. 387), Mrs. Price tells one of her daughters.

Other aspects of autobiography are patent here. Into every one of her novels Jane Austen tosses at least one ball, much in the manner in which Trollope would introduce a fox hunt into virtually every tale. What interests a writer will find its way into the fiction. Fanny's enjoyment of dancing reflects that of the novelist years earlier, as Jane Austen's youthful letters amply testify: “The ball … such an evening of pleasure before her! … she began to dress for it with much of the happy flutter which belongs to a ball” (p. 270). Afterwards, creeping up to bed, Fanny is still “feverish with hopes and fears, soup and negus, sore-footed and fatigued, restless and agitated, yet feeling, in spite of every thing, that a ball was indeed delightful” (p. 281).

Like Jane Austen, Fanny becomes a subscriber to a circulating library—“amazed at being any thing in propria persona, amazed … to be a renter, a chuser of books!” (p. 398). Like the novelist herself, Fanny abhors “improvements” made by gardeners and architects—it is indicative that Henry Crawford is said to be “a capital improver” (p. 244)—who tear up avenues of trees, remove walks, and fabricate ruins to re-create the “natural” through a synthetic impression. Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey argue in the same vein.

In this connection, Mansfield Park betrays Jane Austen's love of nature, her dislike of urban life, and her growing neurasthenia and distaste for “society.” “We do not look in great cities for our best morality” (p. 93), Edmund declares; it might be one of the novel's epigraphs. Even the quality of sunshine is said to be “a totally different thing in a town and in the country.” In Portsmouth, “its power was only … a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sun-shine in a town” (p. 439). Fanny in Portsmouth—losing, as she observes, the glories of a garden in spring—sits “in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust” (p. 439). In the country it is a different matter altogether:

Fanny spoke her feelings. “Here’s harmony!” said she, “here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe. Here’s what may tranquillize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.”

(p. 113)

Thus Fanny at Mansfield. The emphasis here is on the tranquilizing of care; in the city, care is stimulated rather than tranquilized. When Fanny returns home to Mansfield from Portsmouth, “Her eye fell every where on lawns and plantations of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state, when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination” (pp. 446-47). Here is another indication that Jane Austen preferred nature untouched by “improvers,” who left little to the “imagination.”

Fanny's love of nature is underscored by her hatred of noise and disorder; and the Portsmouth chapters of Mansfield Park show Jane Austen's chronic neurasthenia growing to greater proportions—undoubtedly stimulated by her hatred of Godmersham, her brother Edward's house, where we know she spent several traumatic months in 1813 revising the novel. Her letters of the time show that she grew impatient to be gone from the place, where a continuous stream of visitors and an oversupply of children, as in the Price household in Portsmouth, provided a constant uproar and made life miserable for anyone who valued peace and quiet. In Portsmouth the Price boys run around and slam doors until Fanny's “temples ache” (p. 381); she is said to be “almost stunned” by the noise (p. 382). “The living in incessant noise was to a frame and temper, delicate and nervous like Fanny's, an evil which no superadded elegance or harmony could have entirely atoned for. It was the greatest misery of all” (p. 391). Here, certainly, is the neurasthenic novelist at Godmersham. It is no accident that Fanny at Portsmouth, subjected to “closeness and noise … confinement, bad air, bad smells” (p. 432), thinks (p. 431) of Cowper's line, “With what intense desire she wants her home” (Tirocinium; or, A Review of Schools, 565). The “ceaseless tumult of her present abode,” where “every body was noisy, every voice was loud,” where “the doors were in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could command attention when they spoke” (p. 392), must describe Jane Austen's life at Godmersham in 1813, unheard and “want[ing] her home.” The accounts of the effects on a sensitive nature of noise and chaos cannot be wholly invented. Mansfield Park gives us a magnificent picture of Jane Austen's personality in her late thirties. In this way it may be seen less as a “sport” among the novels than a most characteristic and revealing performance.

Other elements of autobiography should be mentioned. There may well be a carry-over of the Bigg Wither affair in the story of Fanny Price and Henry Crawford. In 1802 Jane Austen had been put under considerable pressure by her family to accept a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg Wither, a young man then preparing to take orders. His sisters were close friends of the Austen girls; the families were neighbors in Hampshire. Jane Austen's refusal of Harris Bigg Wither elicited from her family some surprise and resentment—as does Fanny's of Henry Crawford. Sir Thomas petulantly declares, “The advantage or disadvantage of your family—of your parents—your brothers and sisters—never seems to have had a moment's share in your thoughts” (p. 318), and he refers to Fanny's behavior in this crisis as “a wild fit of folly, throwing away … such an opportunity of being settled in life, eligibly, honourably, nobly settled, as will, probably, never occur to you again” (p. 319). Something like this may well have been said to the novelist by a member of her family when she turned down Harris Bigg Wither, seen by the Austens and their connections as a respectable, pleasant, prosperous man who, among other things, would have provided the novelist with a large house in her beloved Hampshire and a comfortable income at a time when she had nothing of her own, no means whatever of “being settled in life,” that state so single-mindedly pursued by most of Jane Austen's heroines. Certainly we cannot know if her mother or aunt or a brother or anyone else spoke to her in this vein. But it is clear, from evidence recently come to light, that Jane's sister tried to persuade her to alter the ending of Mansfield Park to allow Henry Crawford to marry Fanny Price. Apparently feeling that Fanny should indeed be well “settled in life,” Cassandra argued the matter gamely; Jane stood firm, and would not allow it.¹¹ Probably Cassandra's influence is responsible for the assertion late in the novel, by way of mitigation, that if Crawford had “been satisfied with the conquest of one amiable woman's affections” and “persevered,” Fanny must have given way to him eventually (p. 467). In the event Fanny of course is seen to be right in her resistance to Crawford. Her judgment never misleads her; and “for the purity of her intentions she could answer” (p. 324). She understands “how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hopeless and how wicked it was, to marry without affection” (p. 324). The sorely tempted novelist may well have felt something like this during that awful, unforgettable night at Manydown, in the course of which Harris Bigg Wither proposed marriage and she accepted him—only to change her mind the next morning, leaving the house in haste, tears, and embarrassment. After all, as Fanny declares, a woman is not required to love a man, “let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world … a man [need not] be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself” (p. 353). This is as passionate a defense as we are likely to find anywhere of Jane Austen's rejections of the half-dozen or so men who, during her lifetime, offered her marriage. Harris Bigg Wither, according to a family chronicler, turns out to have been a mean-tempered, frail recluse with a stammer.¹² Fanny Price, no less than her author, may be pardoned, even in an age of mercenary marriages, for eluding a match she found repugnant.

The marriage question is of course at the center of Mansfield Park, as it often is in the other books. “There certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them” (p. 3), the narrator complains in the opening paragraph. And yet marriage as an institution is attacked here with special vehemence—perhaps in part because of the personal applications involved. Maria is said to be “prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry” (p. 202). Mary Crawford tells Mrs. Grant, “Every body is taken in … in marriage … it is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves … it is a manœuvring business” (p. 46). Jane Austen undoubtedly felt “taken in” by men on several occasions—in the mid-1790s by Tom Lefroy, her first youthful suitor, who was packed off to Ireland (later to become Chief Justice there) when things between the impecunious young people began to look serious to their families; by the mysterious clergyman who courted her in Devon in 1801 and who, after being virtually accepted by the novelist, disappeared (he may have died, but this is unclear); by several others who proposed to her and, after being refused, found solace elsewhere with what seemed to the novelist spectacular celerity, in the manner of Mr. Collins; and perhaps as well by Harris Bigg Wither, who on one evening appeared to be someone she might like to marry and by the next morning, after much reflection, turned out to be someone quite different after all.

None of this need diminish the role of marriage in giving a woman consequence. Mansfield Park provides a series of glimpses into the novelist's resentful perspective during the years leading up to her literary success and recognition. The most usual complaint is lack of personal consequence among others—which must have been especially galling to an intelligent and sensitive woman in her thirties who had had her chances to marry, after all, but had found marriage a “manœuvring business” and had eschewed it, thus having to give precedence, as a matter of form when in company, to married women, no matter how ignorant. We can see Jane Austen's irritation over matters such as these in Emma, where the insipid Mrs. Elton is given precedence over the intelligent, unmarried Emma Woodhouse merely because the silly woman happens to have a husband. The novelist's distress and impatience are evident in Fanny's feeling that she “can never be important to any one” (p. 26); in her having known, according to the narrator of Mansfield Park, “the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect” because “her motives had been often misunderstood, her feelings disregarded, and her comprehension under-valued” (p. 152); in Mrs. Norris's declaration to Fanny that “wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last” (p. 221); in Fanny's being “totally unused to have her pleasure consulted” (p. 280) on any matter; and in the description of her—it is Henry Crawford's—as “dependent, helpless, friendless, neglected, forgotten” (p. 297). The novelist was the only member of the large Austen family who, before her books began to appear (nothing in print until 1811), had not a single penny of private income. In all of this about Fanny there must be a touch of Jane Austen's own sensibility, though outwardly Fanny is not much like her author. But the word neglect echoes and reechoes through the book like a refrain. And as we have seen, Fanny's values are almost always the novelist's.

“To be in the centre of such a [family] circle, loved by so many … to feel affection without fear or restraint, to feel herself the equal of those who surrounded her, to be at peace” (p. 370)—these are the things Fanny cherishes, as Jane Austen surely did. Away from Chawton—in “society,” among strangers—the novelist could not be secure of them. “A well-disposed young woman, who did not marry for love, was in general but the more attached to her own family” (p. 201), Mansfield Park tells us. Outside the family circle she was more likely to lack consequence, certainly; and to be “neglected before one's time” is “very vexatious,” as we know. Thus Fanny's sexual jealousy of all the acknowledged beauties in the book: the sight of Mary Crawford, for example, fills her “full of jealousy and agitation” (p. 159). The “necessity of self-denial and humility” (p. 463), “the advantages of early hardship and discipline,” and “the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure” (p. 473)¹³ are insisted upon instead; and it is precisely these qualities which Maria Bertram and Mary Crawford, so successful with men, conspicuously lack.

Another characteristic and recognizable touch here is the double vision we encounter on questions of security, comfort, and luxury. Although it is better to have these things than not to have them, it is also seen to be ridiculous to measure all life, to tote people up, purely on the basis of wealth. The attack on materialism goes on from the previous books, but it is tempered in Mansfield Park by some sober thought. “A large income is the best recipé for happiness I ever heard of” (p. 213), Mary declares. “It is every body's duty to do as well for themselves as they can” (p. 289). And: “Varnish and gilding hide many stains” (p. 434). Still, the moral price paid for personal comfort must not be too high; the price Mary pays is too high, and the result is loss of happiness. Jane Austen attacks the subversive side of Mary with special emphasis. “A poor honourable is no catch” (p. 394), she makes Mary say; and Fanny comments that Mary “had only learnt to think nothing of consequence but money” (p. 436). Mary's friend Mrs. Fraser “could not do otherwise than accept [her husband], for he was rich, and she had nothing” (p. 361). This is marriage as merely a steppingstone to luxury. “Every thing is to be got with money” (p. 58), says Mary: it is one of the bitterest comments in the novel. Almost everyone in Mansfield Park is rated by others on the basis of how much he or she has, or can get. Fanny alone seems immune to most of these influences: “she likes to go her own way … she does not like to be dictated to … she certainly has a little spirit of secrecy, and independence,” as even Mrs. Norris sees (p. 323). Throughout her life Jane Austen fiercely protected her own independence—no doubt wishing wistfully at times that she had less need of doing so.

We may see something of the Austen sisters in the amusing account of the Owen sisters, about whom Mary comments: “Their father is a clergyman and their brother is a clergyman, and they are all clergymen together” (p. 289).

And the malicious, heartless side of Jane Austen surely is in evidence when, after telling us that Lady Bertram has little to write letters about until the near-fatal illness of her elder son, the novelist comments acidly that “Lady Bertram's hour of good luck came” (p. 425) and Tom's ordeal “was of a nature to promise occupation for the pen for many days to come” (p. 426). This is Jane Austen herself—the Jane Austen of the letters—speaking, and not Lady Bertram. William Price, ravenous for promotion, is portrayed as impatiently looking forward to the death of the officer immediately superior to him in the Thrush. And the novelist is certainly hard on poor Dr. Grant at the end of the book. “To complete the picture of good” facing Edmund and Fanny, the narrator comments, “the acquisition of Mansfield living by the death of Dr. Grant” (due to overeating) “occurred just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income” (p. 473). There is little irony here.

Many have a fixed image of Jane Austen. People are fond of saying, for example, that Elizabeth Bennet is their idea of what the novelist must have been like. If one accepts this proposition, he is unlikely to think that Fanny Price (or Catherine Morland, or Emma Woodhouse, or Anne Elliot) is a “typical” Jane Austen heroine, or at all like her creator. But none of the heroines is in fact any more or less “typical” than any of the others; each of the novels is equally “typical” of Jane Austen, since she wrote them all. She was a woman of many moods, like the rest of us. The hopeful, more playful mood in which Pride and Prejudice was first drafted was quite different from that in which, fifteen years or so later, Mansfield Park was written. Neither novel is more or less “typical” of Jane Austen than the other, though published just a year apart. One is a product of the novelist's early twenties, the other of her late thirties; and that, in addition to some understanding of how barren and disappointing the novelist's middle years were, may explain a great deal. Each book is equally a Jane Austen performance.

The personality of the novelist may be glimpsed again when we consider briefly two of the most controversial aspects of Mansfield Park and attempt to view them in a more autobiographical light. These are the “ordination” theme and the question of the theatricals (and “acting” in general). In fact there need be little confusion about either of these matters. Jane Austen treats them with clarity and precision—and in a highly characteristic way.

Though obviously the novel, in its final form, turned out not to be primarily about “ordination” after all, despite Jane Austen's characterization of it in these terms in a letter written before the novel had been completed or revised,¹⁴ attitudes toward the church, both as an institution and a profession, are central to the story.

We should never forget that Jane Austen was the daughter of a clergyman and the sister (as it turned out) of two others. She grew up in a household in which it was taken for granted that the profession of clergyman was an important and useful one—one which society could not do without, especially in times of moral laxness. She herself was always a believing Christian, though rarely an aggressive one.

One critic, arguing that the Christianity of Mansfield Park is ardent, sees Fanny as the very embodiment of Christianity itself.¹⁵ While it may be tempting for others (once again) to take the side of the vivacious and irreverent Miss Crawford, who makes fun of clergymen, against Edmund and Fanny, who are sometimes pompous and didactic on the subject of religion, one cannot for a moment suspect Jane Austen in Mansfield Park of any real animus against the church. Mary Crawford's famous pronouncement, “A clergyman is nothing” (p. 92; in terms of social distinction, she means), touches off a debate in the novel on the merits of the profession. (Jane Austen's cousin and sister-in-law Eliza de Feuillide is supposed to have said something of the sort to James Austen many years earlier, when he proposed to her. She married instead his younger brother Henry, then a banker.)

Mary: “A clergyman has nothing to do but to be slovenly and selfish—read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine.”

Edmund: “It is impossible that your own observation can have given you much knowledge of the clergy. You can have been personally acquainted with very few of a set of men you condemn so conclusively.”

Mary: “I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.”

Edmund: “Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or … of something else” (p. 110).

Edmund rightly surmises that Mary has got her “information” from the example and the dinner-table conversation of the worldly Dr. Grant. Certainly Jane Austen has no defense for his sort of clergyman—or any pity either, as we have seen. But the novel does take up the cudgels for the profession. Edmund declares that “it is not in fine preaching only that a good clergyman will be useful in his parish and his neighbourhood”; his “private character” and “general conduct” provide an example for his neighbors (p. 93). It is for this reason that Edmund plans to live in Thornton Lacey rather than permit a curate to do “all the work.” Human nature “needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey,” as Sir Thomas puts it (p. 248). If the clergyman “does not live among his parishioners and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own” (p. 248). A man of social consequence himself, Sir Thomas is not blind to the importance of the profession and encourages Edmund in his clerical career. The assertion of self-improvement when a clergyman does his proper duty is also taken up by Fanny, who makes a little speech on the subject.

“A man—a sensible man like Dr. Grant, cannot be in the habit of teaching others their duty every week, cannot go to church twice every Sunday and preach such very good sermons in so good a manner as he does, without being the better for it himself. It must make him think, and I have no doubt that he oftener endeavours to restrain himself than he would if he had been any thing but a clergyman.”

(p. 112)

The question, then, turns not so much on “ordination” as on attitudes toward the profession of clergyman. It is no surprise that the immoral characters in the novel have no use for the church, while the virtuous ones—dull or not—defend it, with Jane Austen's unwavering blessing.

Although the question of the theatricals has been endlessly debated, it is a much simpler matter than many readers have thought. Again a knowledge of the novelist's life is of use here. For Jane Austen there is inherently nothing wrong with putting on plays or acting in them. From the time she was a young girl, she loved the drama. Early on she relished the family theatricals at Steventon, and later the professional theater in London. All her life she was a dedicated theatergoer—sometimes attending the theater every night when she was in the metropolis. As she makes Charles Musgrove declare in Persuasion, “We all like a play.”¹⁶ The point here is that putting on theatricals at Mansfield Park is not in itself an evil thing. In this particular instance the occasion is used in selfish ways by several people; the situation of some of the principal characters simply makes it wrong to put on a play like Lovers' Vows. For these reasons, rather than any generic ones, the theatricals can be condemned. That is to say, an activity that may be perfectly acceptable in life may be used thematically in fiction for negative purposes. As Edmund says (later) of the time of the theatricals, “we were all wrong together” (p. 349).

There were at least four adaptations of Kotzebue's Natural Son (originally published in Germany in 1791). In England it appeared under the title of Lovers' Vows, and had a great vogue between 1798 and 1802. (Interior evidence, as Chapman says, suggests that the characters in Mansfield Park are using Elizabeth Inchbald's text of the play.) Lovers' Vows was reprinted again and again; in 1799, for example, a twelfth edition was announced (the characters in Jane Austen's novel would appear to be using the fifth edition).¹⁷ Between 1798 and 1802 Lovers' Vows had successful runs at Covent Garden, Bath, the Haymarket, and Drury Lane. Nathaniel Hawthorne saw a production of it in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1820;¹⁸ it was still popular in the 1830s.

Between 1801 and 1805 Lovers' Vows was performed six times at the Theatre Royal in Bath; since Jane Austen lived in Bath during much of this time, it is very likely indeed that she saw it performed there. The point is that the play's concern with adultery, elopement, and an abandoned wife, its attack on the conventions of contemporary marriage, and its exaltation of feeling and impulse render it spectacularly inappropriate to the characters in Mansfield Park as they are placed at the time rehearsals of Lovers' Vows are going forward. Clearly it is dangerous for Maria to play a fallen—or falling—woman, illicitly seduced. Rushworth is cast as a foolish suitor, Mary as a free-thinking “modern” girl (Hazlitt remarked that the role of Amelia in this play was about as far as any contemporary actress was prepared to go; no wonder Edmund is horrified), and Yates as an advocate of elopement. Slated to portray a lovelorn clergyman, Edmund argues that “the man who chooses the profession” of clergyman “is, perhaps, one of the last who would wish to represent it on the stage” (p. 145)—especially when the character is presented unsympathetically. Surely a main ground of Jane Austen's disapproval is that the actors are playing exaggerated versions of themselves rather than really “acting”—to which in fact she had no objection. In Persuasion, on several occasions, fashionable evening parties are pronounced to be less interesting and instructive experiences than nights spent at the theater, where—unlike real life—hypocrisy and insincerity are confined to the stage. Those who prefer parties to plays are that novel's most insipid characters. “I wanted better acting. There was no Actor worthy naming,” Jane Austen grumbled,¹⁹ in the year before Mansfield Park's publication, after seeing a revival of Garrick and Colman's Clandestine Marriage (1766) in London. Of another play in town she would comment later: “Acting seldom satisfies me.”²⁰ No other serious reason for her disapprobation of the theatricals can exist—except, perhaps, the alteration of the house in the absence of its master. Indeed, the theme of “My father's house” is resonant.

Surely Fanny's private opinion of the goings-on once again is that of the novelist. Reading through the play, Fanny is astonished “that it could be chosen in the present instance,” for she thinks that its “situation” and its “language” are unfit for “a private Theatre,” for “home representation” (p. 137). This is undoubtedly true; and anyone who reads both Mansfield Park and Lovers' Vows will immediately understand the grounds of objection. As an interested follower of the fortunes of the Prince Regent and his wife, Jane Austen knew of the extraordinary condition of manners and morals at the Saxon court within the House of Brunswick in these days; inevitably she would have been suspicious of any play emanating from Germany. Needless to say, there is no blanket condemnation in Mansfield Park of the theater or of acting. Indeed, the novel refers enthusiastically to “a love of the theatre” and “an itch for acting … among young people” as being “general” and beyond reproach (p. 121). It is only this play, in these circumstances, that is objectionable. Otherwise, it is clear, Edmund would feel differently. “Nobody loves a play better than you do, or can have gone much farther to see one,” Julia reminds him (p. 124). Tom Bertram “can conceive no greater harm or danger to any of us in conversing in the elegant written language of some respectable author than in chattering in words of our own”—sentiments with which, quite clearly, the novelist would concur. Tom goes on to remind the family that Sir Thomas has always been fond of promoting “the exercise of talent in young people … for any thing of the acting, spouting, reciting kind … he has always a decided taste. I am sure he encouraged it in us as boys” (p. 126)—as Jane Austen's father encouraged such activities at Steventon. Indeed, the tradition of family readings in the evening persisted long after his death. It is indicative that Sir Thomas, upon his unexpected return to the house, does not condemn the theatricals outright, but merely inquires which play is being rehearsed; and that Fanny, so stunned by the choice of Lovers' Vows, always takes great pleasure in hearing “good reading,” to which “she had been long used” (p. 337)—like Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. The fact that Henry Crawford reads well and is also a villain hardly constitutes grounds for arguing that Jane Austen hated acting and actors. Being glib and articulate, Henry reads skillfully. What is called into question by his suspect glibness—his capital acting, his good reading, his propensity for “fine” preaching (before fashionable London congregations)—is his professional (clerical) commitment. Mary Crawford is a brilliant conversationalist, while Fanny is not; does this mean that Jane Austen preferred dull conversation to lively? We are supposed as readers to retain our moral judgment despite any number of provocations to waver. Certainly Jane Austen's perspective never wavers.

One should see Mansfield Park not so much as a falling-off from Pride and Prejudice as simply a book in a different vein. They are different works and tell different stories by different means. Neither is any more “characteristic” of Jane Austen than the other: she is, once again, equally the author of both.

The botched ending of Mansfield Park is also characteristic of its author—a final piece of autobiography. Once again, in working out the conclusion of a novel, Jane Austen “uses summary rather than dramatic scene.”²¹ She cannot bear, it seems, to show us her characters' happiness. That goes on offstage; her interest is chiefly in their struggles.

In the last chapter of Mansfield Park we have, for the fourth time in four novels, a noisy authorial intrusion into the story, another retreat into cold third-person summary, and a happy resolution glimpsed only from afar. The narrative becomes pictorial rather than scenic, to use James's terminology. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest” (p. 461). It may be tempting to see this as irony—as, that is, a burlesque of the novel in less capable hands (a genre to which Jane Austen often had recourse throughout her life)—this time the focus being the diet of poetic justice indiscriminately handed round at the end. But Jane Austen's “impatience” (“impatient” clearly is the key word in the passage just quoted) to have done with her story, once she has got everybody where she wants them, shows up too often in her fiction to be easily passed over. As in the other novels, she cannot bring herself to write the final love scene. Darcy and Elizabeth, Edward and Elinor, Henry and Catherine, all come to a final understanding out of our hearing; so will Emma and Mr. Knightley. And so here: “I … intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire” (p. 470). We have been waiting all through the novel for this to happen; when it finally does, we are not allowed to see it, or Fanny's joy, at firsthand. (One thinks of Emma's response to Mr. Knightley in the garden: “What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.”)²² Jane Austen somewhat self-consciously offers a reason why she has written such an ending: “Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope” (p. 471). Why not? Is it because the novelist never played such a scene herself or had these “feelings”—and thus forbears to write about them? She always disliked trying to describe things of which she had no direct knowledge (nowhere in her books is there a scene between two men alone). On the other hand, there was the Bigg Wither affair. That, of course, had a different conclusion. Surely by now, at age thirty-eight, Jane Austen realized that she herself would never play such a scene as Fanny plays opposite Edmund. Perhaps, then, it was too painful for her to write. In any case, she was always more interested in her characters' distress than in their fulfillment. This is true even in Persuasion, where, after two drafts of the last chapter, Jane Austen came up with only half a love scene; a careful reading demonstrates that much of the climactic action and dialogue either takes place out of our sight and hearing or fails to get itself written at all.

The mood of Mansfield Park is more somber than that of the first three novels (though Sense and Sensibility runs it a close race). Now middle-aged and disappointed, Jane Austen was finding it harder to be sunny. Her anger, for example, embraces Maria Bertram, who is not forgiven at the end of Mansfield Park, as Lydia Bennet was in Pride and Prejudice for a similar offense (of course Maria is much the guiltier of the two). The passage of time, the novelist tells us at the end of Mansfield Park, often undermines and revises “the plans and decisions of mortals, for their own instruction, and their neighbours' entertainment” (p. 472). No longer is detachment from the spectacle of life—seeing others as “entertainment” for oneself—treated ironically, as it was in the character of Mr. Bennet. For Jane Austen, detachment had become by 1814 less a peril to be avoided than a state of existence with which to become reconciled. Here we may see creeping in the darker shadows of the later trio of novels.

“There is nothing like employment, active, indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow. Employment … may dispel melancholy” (p. 443), Mansfield Park tells us. And so Jane Austen found “employment” in writing, and she kept on writing in order to “dispel melancholy.”

Notes

1. “What Became of Jane Austen? [Mansfield Park],” originally published in The Spectator, no. 6745 (October 4, 1957), 339-40; quoted here from Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 141-42.

2. The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed., III (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 68.

3. “A Proper Lively Time with Fanny Price,” Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 158-204; see especially pp. 182, 164-65, 194, and 175.

4. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 76.

5. Character and Conflict in Jane Austen's Novels: A Psychological Approach (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), p. 22.

6. Darrel Mansell, The Novels of Jane Austen: An Interpretation (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 110.

7. Reported by Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 60.

8. Jane Austen to Francis Austen, 3 July and 25 September 1813, in Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 317 and 340.

9. Mrs. Austen found Fanny “insipid.” See “Opinions of Mansfield Park collected and transcribed by Jane Austen,” in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 49.

10. On Mrs. Leigh Perrot's trial for shoplifting and other possible offenses committed by her, see Sidney Ives, The Trial of Mrs. Leigh Perrot (Boston: privately printed, 1980), passim. In a private note to the present writer, Mr. Ives quotes Alexander Dyce as saying that Mrs. Leigh Perrot “had an invincible propensity to theft” and the Austen family knew it. Still, she was never convicted of anything. Jane Austen, who did not like her aunt, was being malicious.

11. The information comes from some correspondence recently discovered at Castle Howard. See Elizabeth Jenkins, “Address” to the General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society (Report for the Year 1980), p. 26.

12. Reginald F. Bigg Wither, Materials for a History of the Wither Family (Winchester: privately printed, 1907).

13. Despite her avowed dislike of Jane Austen's novels, Charlotte Brontë seems to have remembered this section of Mansfield Park well enough when she came to write the scene in Jane Eyre (chap. 27) in the course of which the heroine reminds Rochester, “We were born to strive and endure.”

14. To Cassandra Austen, 29 January 1813 (Letters, p. 298).

15. See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 243.

16. Novels, V, 223.

17. See Chapman's note on Lovers' Vows in Novels, III, 474.

18. Reported by Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 26.

19. To Francis Austen, 25 September 1813 (Letters, p. 338).

20. To Anna Austen Lefroy, 29 November 1814 (Letters, p. 415).

21. John Odmark, An Understanding of Jane Austen's Novels: Character, Value, and Ironic Perspective (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981), p. 102.

22. Novels, IV, 431.