Jane Austen's Boldest Novel Is Also Her Least Understood

Summary

Another aunt, a parsimonious busybody, married a Reverend Norris, and Fanny’s own mother rather too hastily married one Price, a lieutenant of marines, who has become an out-of-work heavy drinker by the time we meet him. To her great misfortune, soon after her marriage, Mrs. Price has nine children in 11 years, with not nearly enough money to support them, and in desperation she agitates for a rapprochement among the sisters, and the rich Bertram family at last deigns to help. Thus, the oldest Price girl, Fanny, is plucked from her pack of siblings and, at 10 years old, largely unlettered, hypersensitive and extremely timid, the girl is thrust into the life of Mansfield Park, a great estate in the country. Out of nowhere, this child raised in roughness is elevated to a class so far from her own that she feels terrified all the time, and is told in every possible way that she is worthless by her nasty, domineering Aunt Norris.Next to Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet or even Anne Elliot from “Persuasion” (who is perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of Austen’s heroines), Fanny Price indeed looks a little wan and thin, a bit of a party-pooper, mulishly unwilling to join in the fun when the superego of the estate, Lord Bertram, is away on his property in Antigua and the young people of the household decide to put on a play.This is an unjust assessment, however, because the other Austen heroines are full-grown women from good families who love them, if imperfectly, and poor Fanny is still just a child who is almost entirely unloved, having been forcibly removed from her family of birth, verbally abused on the daily, left to linger in an uncertain and inferior status in the house, and, among the noisy extroverted cousins, she’s the solo introvert who, if she wants to have any space at all to breathe, has to escape to a forgotten room that is painful to her because she has been forbidden to keep a fire there. This sensitive creature is so starved for affection that t...