by Jane Austen
--Edinburgh Review (January 1843)
William Dean Howells
[Jane Austen] was great and [her novels] were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists.
--My Literary Passions (1895)
Adolphus Alfred Jack
'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' are the gay offsprings of youth. Very different is the tone of 'Mansfield Park,' justly considered its author's most finished production. But in reading we are conscious that half our wonder is gone. The result may be, and in some ways is, more considerable than anything achieved bv the earlier efforts. In 'Mansfield Park,' Miss Austen's art is seen in its most delicate form, her style is quieter, the effects she produces with it are even subtler than before. Nevertheless it is the mature fruit of a mature tree. What delights incomparably in the books of the first period, is the union of girlish freshness, of youthful zest, with the admirable mental balance which only experience can give. "Is it possible," asks Mr. Jowett in his diary, "for youth to have the experience and observation and moderation of age, or for age to retain the force of youth?" Miss Austen's powers grew and deepened, but in her first books we find the sense and discrimination of her last, and it is this which taken together with their gaiety gives to them their peculiar charm. It is as if it were possible to be at once old and young, as if a girl were to go to a ball, dance it out, and enjoy everything as much as any one there, with the full unreflecting reception essential for perfect enjoyment, and yet immediately after see the matter with the eyes of one who had gone to judge of the characters. This union of youth and age then, of things hardly ever found together, gives a mark even more distinguishing than excellence to such a novel as 'Pride and Prejudice.' 'Mansfield Park' is altogether an old book, perfect perhaps if we leave out of account the melodrama of the conclusion, and the occasional flapping of an extremely white white choker, but still old, with all its merit with none of the merit of youth.
'Pride and Prejudice' is gay, 'Mansfield Park' is almost sombre.
--Essays on the Novel (1897)
Hiram M. Stanley
How well I recall the greatest literary pleasure of my life, its time and place! A dreary winter's day without, within a generous heat and glow from the flaming grate, and I reclining at my ease on the library lounge, Mansfield Park in hand. Then succeed four solid hours of literary bliss, and an absorption so great that when I mechanically close the book at the last page it is only by the severest effort that I come back to the real world of pleasant indoors and bleak outdoors. I was amazed that I, a hardened fiction reader, should be so transported by this gentle tale of Miss Austen's, and yet I enjoyed to the full the aftertaste of her perfect realistic art....
In Fanny Price we find no flaw of artistic presentment. Here comes before our eyes a real, a free, a complex human being, in whose veins, as Gautier remarks of Balzac's characters, "runs a true red blood, instead of ink, which common authors pour into their creations." Further, I am acquainted with no more charming figure in fiction than Fanny; she is so completely, perfectly, deliciously feminine in instinct, feeling, manner, and intelligence, and in every way a most engaging revelation of a budding womanliness. This womanliness, slightly bourgeoise, perhaps, but never vulgar or gross, depicted so surely and delicately, is, I think, the element in Miss Austen's work which chiefly attracts the masculine mind, and which delighted Macaulay, Scott, Guizot, Whately, and Coleridge. Masson reports that he had known the most hard-headed men in ecstasies with it, and that the only objection as brought against it by ladies is that it reveals too many of their secrets. Jane Austen certainly accomplishes the delineation of the character of Fanny with a fascinating, unobtrusive fidelity to feminine nature, and with a clearness and wholeness in the creation, miniaturely Shakespearean.
I cannot resist the impression that in Fanny Miss Austen has in large measure written down herself. Certain it is that both show the same gentle and true femininity, the same domestic kindliness, the same delicacy of perception, and the same sensitiveness. Both are fond of dancing, and the ball episode in Mansfield Park, a masterpiece of quiet realism, takes, no doubt, much of its colouring from Miss Austen's own disposition and experience. Both likewise delight in the drama, and are keenly sensitive to natural beauty.
--Essays on Literary Art (1897)
London Quarterly Review
Lord Tennyson liked Mansfield Park best of all Jane Austen's novels, and though that would not be the general verdict, it remains, as one critic says, 'the finest example of her power of sustaining the interest throughout a long and quiet narrative.' Fanny Price is one of her best delineations of character, and the studies of the two Bertram girls and Miss Crawford are fine pieces of work
--July 1922
Virginia Woolf
[Jane Austen is] the most perfect artist among women.
--The Common Reader (1925)
QUESTIONS
1. William Dean Howells, a realist himself, wrote that "Jane Austen was the first and last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness." How is Austen true to her material? Are there any ways in which she is not?
2. Hiram M. Stanley wrote that he was "acquainted with no more charming figure in fiction than Fanny; she is so completely, perfectly, deliciously feminine in instinct, feeling, manner, and intelligence, and in every way a most engaging revelation of a budding womanliness." Lionel Trilling, on the other hand, says that "nobody" could like the heroine of Mansfield Park. Who's right?
3. Jane Austen is famous for her wit, but she is not witty in general; her wit, like that of Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain, is at the expense of something or someone. What are the objects of Austen's wit? Can you draw up a list of characteristics or a general structure of her wit?
4. In the introduction to this volume, Amanda Claybaugh describes the tension, even conflict, in the novel between stability, as represented by the "country house," and "improvement." With only a bit of stretching, these two tropes can be translated into conservatism and liberalism. Does the tension in Mansfield Park in any way illuminate our current political situation?
For Further Reading
THE LIFE AND WORKS OF JANE AUSTEN
Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. Vol. 4 of The Novels of Jane Austen. Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.
--------. Jane Austen's Letters. Edited by Deirdre Le Faye. Third edition (new edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
--. Northanger Abbey. 1818. In vol. 5 of The Novels of Jane Austen. Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.
. Persuasion. 1818. In vol. 5 of The Novels of Jane Austen. Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.
--. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Vol. 2 of The Novels of Jane Austen. Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.
--. Sense and Sensibility. 1811. Vol. 1 of The Novels of Jane Austen. Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.
Austen-Leigh, James Edward. 1870. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: Richard Bentley, 1870. The earliest biography of Austen, written by her nephew.
Fergus, Jan S. Jane Austen: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. 1984. Reprint: Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.
THE WRITING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Edited by Conor Cruise O'Brien. New York: Penguin Books, 1968. The conservative view of the revolution.
Godwin, William. The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 1794. New York: R
inehart, 1960. A Jacobin novel.
More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife. 1809. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995. An anti-Jacobin novel.
Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man, Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution. 1791. In The Rights of Man and Other Writings, with an introduction by Arthur Calder-Marshall. London: Heron, 1970. The radical view of the revolution.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria, or the Wrongs of Women. 1797. Edited by Moira Ferguson. NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1975. A Jacobin novel.
RECENT AUSTEN CRITICISM
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Argues that Austen was an anti-Jacobin novelist.
Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. Provides a history of landscape gardening.
Fraiman, Susan. Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Feminist discussion of the bildungsroman.
Gay, Penny. Jane Austen and the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Historical and biographical discussion of the theater.
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Argues that Austen was more of a Jacobin.
Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Theoretical discussion of the theater.
Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Focuses on Austen's style.
. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Focuses on Austen's structure.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987. Economic discussion of the bildungsroman.
Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Excellent introduction to the novels.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Post-colonial discussion of the country house.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Marxist discussion of the country house.
a Part of a garden planted to look uncultivated.
b Sunken fence.
c Adaptation by English writer Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) of Das Kind der Liebe, by German playwright August von Kotzebue (1761-1819); see the introduction for a more extensive discussion (pp. xxiii-xxvi).
d Whist is a card game similar to bridge; speculation is a round game in which players ante up, draw cards, and then buy and sell them to try to make the highest trump.