Mansfield Park

It has been a while since I read a Jane Austen novel. Fanny, the shy, sensitive, intelligent and morally upright girl is the poor cousin brought up in her wealthy maternal aunt's house. Nobody takes any notice of her but her cousin Edmund, so of course she loves him devotedly. The arrival of Mary and Henry Crawford, a well to do, lively, and attractive brother and sister brings changes to the more or less placid life everyone is leading at Mansfield Park.

I feel a little queasy about the way things turned out. I was rooting for Henry, so that Fanny could get out of the Bertram household and experience a little more of the world. But rooting for which man the heroine “gets to” (has to) marry also feels bad–mercenary, crude, in bad taste. And crude and mercenary people who value the wrong things are at issue in this book. The idea of marrying without love is spoken of as shameful, but at the same time Fanny is pressured to marry Henry even though she says she can never love him, and all around her women are marrying without love so that they can have the closest thing to an independent life that exists in those times.

Also, there is class consciousness. Fanny, the daughter of an “unsuitable” marriage between a young woman of a “good family” and a sailor, is gentle, kind, has good manners and a good mind, although her aunts and cousins undervalue her because of her lower class background. But Mrs. Norris, one of her “quality” aunts, is selfish, mean, and unable to see those qualities in herself or others.

In spite of my queasiness about how insular Fanny's life is, it's an absorbing book and a classic for a reason. Jane Austen has an unmerciful eye for people and their hypocrisy.