Mansfield Park was published only a year after Pride and Prejudice, but moving from one novel to the other the reader is keenly aware of a change of tone and atmosphere. Partly it is that Mansfield Park is evidently the work of an older, maturer, woman. The narrator is not an intrusive presence, by any means, but one who, while an insider of the world she depicts, can also see beyond it. ‘Poor woman! she probably thought change of air might agree with many of her children’, she remarks of the beleaguered Mrs. Price at the conclusion of chapter 1 ([Mansfield Park hereafter] MP 11). It is a voice with a range of sympathy beyond the social commonwealth of rich families that is the milieu of Mansfield Park.

Almost everyone in this novel is wealthy. Sir Thomas Bertram is a Member of Parliament with a large estate and property in the West Indies; Henry Crawford also has an estate, and enough income easily to afford to have it totally ‘improved’ as soon as he comes of age. His sister Mary has twenty thousand. Mr. Rushworth has a park five miles round and a Tudor mansion. Told that Henry Crawford has ‘four thousand a year’, Mrs. Rushworth senior seems to feel that this is just enough to get by: ‘Very well.—Those who have not more, must be satisfied with what they have’ (118). These are ‘young people of fortune’, far better off than those in any other Austen novel, and untroubled, despite Sir Thomas' need to see to his Antigua estates, by any sense of financial insecurity. Only Mrs. Norris is obsessed with saving, a neurotic compensation for her inferior family position whose other manifestation is her remorseless bullying of her even poorer niece, Fanny Price. In part the novel is a study in the assumptions and manners of the very rich, in the manners of ‘society’, as the initial conversation between the Crawfords and the Bertrams, about ‘coming out’ (48-51), indicates. Spoilt, full of self-consequence, good-looking, healthy, the Bertrams do not need to be proud like Lady Catherine de Bourgh or Sir Walter Elliot. Their vanity is in such good order that they can appear free of it. Lordly, careless, insouciant, and selfish, Tom Bertram at least has some sense of humour.

In Pride and Prejudice, the great estate of Pemberley is viewed by a visitor and outsider, and Elizabeth Bennet gives it all the awe and respect of one who can say only that she is ‘a gentleman's daughter’. But in Mansfield Park, the reader is, so to speak, a resident, shown what it is like to live from day to day in such a place. The spaciousness of the house is an important factor in the lives and events that the novel traces, and much of Austen's narrational skill in the brilliant first volume consists in the manipulation and interweaving of a large number of characters and destinies within one locale that is also a group of distinct spaces. For Fanny, the novel's uprooted heroine, ‘[t]he grandeur of the house astonished, but could not console her. The rooms were too large for her to move in with ease. Whatever she touched she expected to injure, and she crept about in constant terror of something or other’ (14-15). Just taken away from her mother and her family, Fanny projects onto the furniture her own sense of the potential injuriousness of this space, felt to be both empty and hostile. Mansfield is not, on the whole, a glamorous or idyllic home (until it becomes such in Fanny's eyes at the end of the novel). Harassed and disregarded, Fanny gradually constructs a substitutively maternal space where she can be happy; furnishing the East room with discarded bric-à-brac and carelessly donated gifts, she makes a fragile ‘nest of comforts’ that is an emotional as well as physical improvisation. But this room which Fanny thinks of as ‘her own’, that she has made her own, is always actually marked as the room of a dependent, a transient, by the absence of a fire in the grate.

Jane Austen's ability to make the setting integral to her development of character can be illustrated too, by the early scene where the youthful Fanny is waiting for Mary Crawford to return with the mare that she has borrowed. She is scolded out of the house by Mrs. Norris and discerns the party of Edmund, Mary, and the groomsmen across the valley. ‘The sound of merriment ascended even to her’ (67): the phrasing subtly makes Fanny's geographical distance from the group a simultaneous index of her emotional isolation. ‘After a few minutes, they stopt entirely, Edmund was close to her, he was speaking to her, he was evidently directing her management of the bridle, he had hold of her hand; she saw it, or the imagination supplied what the eye could not reach’ (67); and the rhythm supplies the undercurrent of Fanny's jealousy. Not ‘see’ but ‘reach’. How that suggests the distance across which Fanny's eyes are straining!

From one point of view, Fanny Price is an interesting psychological study in the manners and attitudes of a radically insecure and traumatized personality. The impatience that one inevitably feels with some of her more censorious or prim judgments may be moderated by the careful history of displacement Austen has provided for her, her years of unremitting intimidation by Mrs. Norris, and her youthful dependence on an Edmund whose kindness comes along with a good deal of tutorly instruction. Her disapproving attitude towards Mary is always complicated by its jealous colouring as well as an even more disqualifying trait, envy. Fanny's moral attitudes in general are overdetermined—part the result of Edmund's coaching, part the result of her own nature and insecurities—and so it is a great simplification to see her as modelling a ‘conduct book’, a Christian, or an evangelical heroine. Does she refuse to act in Lovers' Vows out of fear of acting, or out of disapproval of the play? She certainly offers her timidity as her excuse, thereby displaying that timidity rather than moral righteousness.

Mansfield Park is a novel in the mode of the omniscient narrator, and for the first and only time in her novels, Jane Austen continuously allows the narrative to move freely in and out of the consciousnesses of a whole range of characters. In Pride and Prejudice, there are moments, especially early in the novel, when Darcy's and Charlotte Lucas' thoughts are presented. In Persuasion, the reader is shown at one crucial moment Captain Wentworth's still-burning anger against Anne. But in Mansfield Park the independence of the narrator from any one controlling consciousness is a structural principle. This text at various times represents the thinking processes or picks up the internal speech-cadences of Maria Bertram, Edmund Bertram, Sir Thomas, Mary Crawford, and several others, besides Fanny Price. When Sir Thomas overhears Mr. Yates in full ranting flight on the improvised stage at Mansfield the narrative borrows his point of view at the beginning of the paragraph, and, to heighten the comic effect, Tom Bertram's at the close (182-3).

Perhaps most significantly, this novel presents whole scenes and dialogues from which the heroine is absent. The scenes at the Parsonage between Mary and Henry Crawford (and sometimes with Mrs. Grant) are quite freestanding. They depict the relationship between the Crawfords at first without reference to Fanny. Thus the novel is structured with two different centres or foci of interest. In the mode of ‘free indirect speech’, Mary's thoughts about her prospects on entering a new place and about older brothers, for example, are allowed to enter the text without authorial commentary. Following from these gay and brilliant introductory scenes (volume 1, chapters 4 and 5) the narrator naturally keeps the reader in touch with Mary Crawford's private thoughts—she has been given the representational treatment of a major figure, and her projects accordingly draw from one a certain sympathetic attention. It is not the fact that Mary is vivacious, while the supposed heroine Fanny is timid and nervous, that makes for this novel's moral complications: it is that the rival figures are each accorded an almost equivalent narrative stature until Fanny's removal to Portsmouth in the last volume.

The reporting of Mary's thoughts moves fluidly between the medium of indirect speech, the dramatic representation of her behaviour, and direct commentary on both. Different modes, or rather dimensions or aspects, of presentation throughout the novel tend to suggest different moral agendas. When Sir Thomas Bertram interviews Maria and asks her whether she wants to press on with the engagement to Rushworth (200-1) his thoughts are outlined like an internal monologue without quotation marks. The reader is expected to see through the self-deceptions and convenient blindnesses of his reasonings, but to retain the vestigial sympathy one conventionally has for a figure whose thought-processes, whose capacity to reflect, one has intimately followed. (This is one of the reasons why Sir Thomas, for all his failures—and he never fails in his kindness to his wife—is a fundamentally respectable figure.) The caustic comments that follow—‘Such and such-like were the reasonings of Sir Thomas’—are an abrupt shift of address, and require a change of attitude from the reader from participatory leniency to dismissive contempt. These abutments of aspect (not always as abrupt as here) are one source of the novel's scintillating life, but they sometimes cause ethical anxiety in the reader that is not entirely resolved.

The presentation of Mary and Henry Crawford, freestanding, but doubled through the perspective of the heroine, is the major instance of this challenge. Mary has lived in London and has a range of social skills that are apparently worldly and sophisticated, but viewed from Fanny's position, she often seems sadly maladroit. One complication of her tone—her ‘sweet peculiarity of manner’ as Edmund describes it—is a tincture of disillusionment that is not quite as cynical as she imagines. The sketch of Mary's years at the Admiral's house that emerges from her allusions, however witty and professedly unconcerned, indicates a history that invites sympathy for a damaged life. When she is married, she tells Mrs. Grant, she will be a staunch defender of the marriage state, and adds ‘I wish my friends in general would be so too. It would save me many a heart-ache’ (47). Her disrespectful description of her uncle's household—‘of Rears and Vices, I saw enough’—is witty, but the crudity of the wit laughs off an enormity she feels but has no way of approaching directly. (Her assessment is not in doubt: the narrator has said previously that the Admiral was a man of ‘vicious habits’.)

‘In short, it is not a favourite profession of mine. It has never worn an amiable form to me’ (60). The remarks scandalize Fanny and Edmund, but their intensity, which is replicated whenever Mary brings up the topic of life at the Admiral's, betrays an unhappy experience that is clearly formative. Mary's history, brought up in the charge of her aunt and uncle, mirrors Fanny's, and one might justly suppose that the traumatic effects of her adoptive home on one personality are as relevant to the author's purpose as they are on the other. In other words, though Mary's worldliness is viewed critically (through the eyes of Fanny and Edmund especially) it is also readable as a coping strategy, a sign of an insecurity much less manifest than Fanny's, but nonetheless, critical.

The complications of feeling and judgment these different dimensions of narration give rise to can be exemplified by the famous scene when Mrs. Norris turns on Fanny and accuses her of being ‘a very obstinate, ungrateful girl … very ungrateful indeed, considering who and what she is’ (147). The setting is the drawing room, where Tom, Maria, Henry Crawford, and Mr. Yates are at a table with the play in front of them, while Lady Bertram on her sofa, Edmund, Fanny, and Mrs. Norris are grouped nearer the fire. The separation is political. Mary Crawford's predicament and nervousness (she wants Edmund to act the Anhalt role but does not know how to approach the question) is defined by her movement between one and the other set of people within the room. She shifts from group to group, in response to different promptings, her freedom a sign not of independence but of her need to attach herself, to find a centre for her emotional life—almost, one might say, to find a home. When Edmund snubs her, she ‘was silenced; and with some feelings of resentment and mortification’, the reader is told, ‘moved her chair’ towards Mrs. Norris at the tea-table.

The reader's main focus is on Fanny, who is the target of Tom's plans, so that the little drama of Mary's manoeuvres interweaves it only as a subsidary theme. The climax is Tom's repeated ‘attack’ on Fanny and Mrs. Norris' angry speech. Mary's immediate response is ‘I do not like my situation; this place is too hot for me’ and her moving of her chair once again to the opposite side of the table. Mary's action, the completion of her series of movements, is sympathetically described as she continues to talk to Fanny and to try ‘to raise her spirits, in spite of being out of spirits herself’. But in a moment one's admiration for her courage and kindness becomes undermined: ‘By a look to her brother, she prevented any farther entreaty from the theatrical board, and the really good feelings by which she was almost purely governed, were rapidly restoring her to all the little she had lost in Edmund's favour’ (147). This odd sentence, beginning with Mary's (or the narrator's) point of view and ending with Edmund's, seems to attribute to him an unwarranted insight into Mary's motives, and the upshot is a carping note all-too-consonant with the suspiciousness of Fanny. The dramas of the two young women have been presented contrapuntally, but at this point where their projects actually clash the task of keeping sympathy for both figures alive in the narrative proves just too much. This episode presents a miniature version of the narrative knot that Austen cuts in the last section of the novel by removing Fanny to Portsmouth and allowing only her consciousness to preside.

‘By a look to her brother’: the reader's responses to Mary Crawford are also complicated by the fact that the dialogues between Mary and Henry emphasize their mutual rapport. They seem to have a family style, teasing, humorous, generous, that contrasts with the absence of anything like wit or style among the Bertrams. One never sees Julia and Maria, who are said to get on well, for example, in conversation, and Tom only speaks to Edmund in order crudely to make clear who is boss. Henry, as Mary declares, ‘loves me, consults me, confides in me’ (59). Henry's regard for Mary invites the reader to see his flirtations with Maria and Julia in a light that is perhaps a shade different from the youthful Fanny's abhorrence. (Mary's resolve to keep her affections under control also cannot but make one despise Maria's sulky disregard of consequences.) Thus the Crawfords' worldliness is accompanied by a complicating un-Bertramesque mutuality, kindness, and adulthood. They exemplify that ‘fraternal’ tie (235) the narrator celebrates explicitly in reference to Fanny and William.

Henry Crawford is as marked as his sister by the arrangements in his uncle's household. Fatherless and allowed a free rein by the Admiral, Henry does not require the approval of others to feel justified in what he does: in fact he rather relishes opposition than the reverse, which perhaps explains his persistence in the courtship of the anything but graciously reluctant Fanny. Henry's pursuit of his sexual objects, in this instance Maria, is accompanied by contempt for those objects. Austen implies that he has picked up such attitudes from his uncle. But she also succeeds in suggesting how his spoilt and liberal upbringing can result in fascination when the beloved offers the challenge, but also the comfort, of inflexible resistance. ‘“I could so wholly and absolutely confide in her,” said he; “and that is what I want”’ (294).

Henry's courtship of Fanny is accompanied by conversations in which he discusses it with Mary, and his love for Fanny by her endorsement, or, perhaps, collusion. The dual focus is most brilliantly exploited in chapters 11 and 12 of the second volume. For many chapters, the novel has seen events mainly from the standpoint of Fanny Price. It is her view of Henry's flirtations that has been given, her mistrust, resentment, and reluctance have been highlighted, even while it is counterpointed and ironically at odds with the excitements and delights of the Crawfords. After the ball, which Sir Thomas has organized from the hardly conscious wish to promote Fanny's chances with Henry, Edmund goes away to be ordained. In chapter 11, Fanny's state of mind is described, but then the narrative shifts its focus on to Mary at the Parsonage. It is now she whose thoughts are filled with anxiety and self-mistrust, and who now contends ‘with one disagreeable emotion entirely new to her—jealousy’ (286). The positions of the two young women have been reversed as Mary tries to extract some reassurance of her power over Edmund from the unbending Miss Price.

In chapter 12, Henry returns and announces, to Mary's astonishment, that he intends to marry Fanny Price. The genius of this almost entirely dramatic scene is that it gives full recognition to the excitement, gaiety, and exhilaration of the two figures who challenge the narrative and moral status of the hero and heroine. The reader's responses are not inhibited by reservations from the narrator. What also makes it so telling is that it is not merely a scene of mutual delight and congratulation, but that it touches once more on the painful family history that has made these two, and their needs, what they are. Henry, even while he acknowledges the grossness of his uncle, says of him ‘Few fathers would have let me have my way half so much.’ In the midst of her delight, with her mind racing ahead to what this means for her own prospects, Mary is stopped and sounds a sombre note: ‘Henry, I think so highly of Fanny Price, that if I could suppose the next Mrs. Crawford would have half the reason which my poor ill used aunt had to abhor the very name, I would prevent the marriage, if possible’ (296). The gravity of this declaration suggests once again the unhappy psychological background that leads Mary, in this very dialogue, to fantasize a reconstituted family—cousins and brother and sister—together in Northamptonshire, a fantasy that ironically duplicates some of Fanny's own longings.

It is not only psychological depth and narrative orchestration that make Mansfield Park a milestone in the English novel. The novelist imagines the physical world in which her figures move to have a palpable presence, an effective bearing on their lives. At one point in Pride and Prejudice, the narrator remarks casually on ‘the shrubbery where this conversation passed’ ([Pride and Prejudice hereafter] PP 86). Settings are never neutral backgrounds in Mansfield Park, and the gardens at Sotherton, famously, are made to play an integral, even determinative part in the action. It is not only that one can read them in allegorical terms, as the punning exchange of Henry and Maria about her ‘prospects’ invites one to do. It is rather as if emotional pressures and urgencies were felt, and conveyed to the reader, in spatial terms, as when Maria declares so intensely ‘I cannot get out, as the starling said’ (MP 99). As the figures move, disperse, and reassemble within the various venues Sotherton and Mansfield and Portsmouth offer them, one is made vividly conscious not only of the opportunities and inhibitions of these spaces, but of their being at issue—contested over, claimed, and owned. Maria's disregard of the locked gate is to be echoed in Tom's overturning the arrangements of his father's rooms: both express their egotistical drives as the usurpation of territory. Fanny seeks to keep Edmund at the window looking at the stars, Mary lures him indoors with her music. Characters and their bodies are imagined precisely within settings that are drawn into the narrative and act as provocations to conversation and action.

This capacity to dramatize space and to make the human drama inseparable from its physical location reaches its peak in the scenes at Portsmouth. As Edward Said observes [in Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994)], for example, the ‘solitary candle’ that Fanny's father holds ‘between himself and the paper, without any reference to her possible convenience’ (382) ‘renders very precisely the dangers of unsociability, of lonely insularity, of diminished awareness that are rectified in larger and better administered spaces’. It is this evening that Fanny remembers three months later when her depression is deepened by the sun that brings its glare to illuminate the dirt and disorder of her parents' parlour. When she returns to Mansfield with Edmund in early spring an affiliation between emotional state, narrative purpose, and landscape setting—the trees in ‘that delightful state … while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination’ (446-7)—suggests the possibilities that are to be explored further in Emma and Persuasion.