A Contrary Wind: a variation on Mansfield Park (Mansfield Trilogy Book 1)

by Lona Manning

  The Bertrams heard infrequently from their brother Tom in Virginia, but when he did send them a line, it was to assure them that his affairs prospered in the fresh air and soil of the New World. He professed himself to be content, and he was never heard to regret his decision to leave his old life in England.

  Dr. Grant and his wife continued in the parsonage in Mansfield. Edmund Bertram did not shun their company, nor they his; rather, he visited and dined with them frequently and discussed parish business with Dr. Grant, and occasionally Mrs. Grant would tell him, sotto voce, that ‘Mary was thought to be staying with Lord and Lady Delingpole at their country estate in Wales’ or ‘Mary had returned to London but had given up the Wimpole Street house.’

  Edmund Bertram devoted himself to his parish and his duties, and found therein some measure of peace. With the death of his brother-in-law and the departure of his wife, he found himself liable for the cost of the extensive alterations which they had thrust upon him, and which would have plunged him into debt for years. He sold his hunters to meet the debt and his father paid off the balance, because, unlike many men of pedigree, they regarded any debt, even a debt to a tradesman, as something to be honoured. Edmund did not resent the fact that the home served as a kind of memorial to the genius and taste of Henry Crawford, a man of many faults but also of many talents, whom he did not cease to regret, or to remember.

  As for Julia, she did not wish to live in Norfolk, and her father, for the sake of her reputation, did not wish her to live with Maria. He settled an allowance on Julia, and entrusted Edmund with her supervision. Julia divided her time between acting as a hostess for her brother at Thornton Lacey and accepting invitations to visit the homes of the friends she made during her season in London. And while some assumed that Mrs. Norris would also take up residence with her nephew, sadly, a lack of bedrooms—for, Edmund informed her, he must always keep a spare room for a friend—prevented him from offering her permanent shelter under his roof.

  Although Julia Bertram of Thornton Lacey might not make as brilliant a match as Miss Julia of Mansfield Park, and although the previous year had been an unhappy one for her, she had gained juster notions about the sort of man who was best calculated to make her happy, and such a man would be as different from Henry Crawford as could be imagined. An open temper, a quiet dedication to duty, a warm and sympathetic heart, were all she prized now and held out as her secret ideal. Out from the shadow of her older sister, who had always been considered her superior in beauty and accomplishment, Julia gave every promise of growing up to be an affectionate and thoughtful woman. Her temper was naturally the easiest of the two; her feelings, though quick, were more controllable, and education had not given her so very hurtful a degree of self-consequence. Her cheerful companionship supported Edmund’s spirits, and at her artless suggestion, he began a correspondence with his cousin Lieutenant Price, which led to a deep and sincere friendship between the two young men.

  Lieutenant William Price continued his service under Captain Columbine aboard the frigate Crocodile, which returned to the African coast, to the great anxiety of his family and friends, who regarded his being stationed in a climate so deleterious to the European constitution as more likely to be fatal than direct warfare against the French, an apprehension that was well founded, as the rate of death among the sailors of the anti-slavery squadron was by far the highest in the fleet. Nevertheless, the ever-sanguine William saw in such a situation only the increased chances for promotion, and in rescuing Africans from the toils of the slavers, an activity he relished for its own sake, he anticipated the acquisition of handsome bounties.

  William’s participation in apprehending the Clementine did him no disservice in the eyes of his uncle or his family, who all understood that he was doing his duty, and it provided a reassurance to Fanny that even the best-intentioned actions can have unexpected consequences, and that fear of the worst ought not to deter us from prudently acting for the best.

  After the breakup of the establishment at Mansfield Park, Fanny was invited to reside with Mrs. Butters in Stoke Newington. Fanny came to love Mrs. Butters almost as a mother, and Mrs. Butters was likewise very attached to Fanny, and was happy to provide her with a home until the circumstances arose in which Fanny could enter a home of her own. Mrs. Butters was very careful of Fanny’s health, and would not permit her to over tax herself. They worked together in helping to establish a sort of academy for young seamstresses, and Fanny educated herself on every detail of the dressmakers’ trade.

  Although Fanny was reconciled with Maria and Julia and wished them well, her heart, her inclinations, her warmth and interest were more for her own brothers and sisters. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connexions can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Although William would always remain her favourite, she established correspondence with her brothers John and Richard, and as with Susan, was amazed to learn how the more fearless disposition and happier nerves of the younger Prices aided them as made their own way in the world. John worked as a junior clerk in the rough-and-tumble world of the police who patrolled the London docks. Though only seventeen, there was not much of human frailty he had not witnessed at first hand. Richard, at sixteen, had been at sea for four years, and was shouldering the responsibilities of a man while still a youth. Fanny gave all of her heart and pride to her brothers and sisters, acknowledging the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.

  William Gibson was some months recovering his health and strength from the effects of the malarial fever contracted from the pestilential shores of Africa. He used his time as an invalid to arrange his notes and write his account of the brief but eventful last voyage of the Solebay, and the capture of the slave ship Clementine, as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Smallridge, who offered him a small cottage on their property. After so many months sharing the cramped quarters on board ship, the absolute solitude and peace of the countryside revived his spirits and his enthusiasm for the great struggle for the eradication of slavery which still lay ahead.

  Whatever the expectations of her friend Mrs. Butters, Fanny, while harbouring feelings of the greatest respect and regard for Mr. Gibson, did not believe that he was ready to enter upon married life, nor, in truth, was she. A few more years were wanting to replace her girlish timidity with the quiet self-confidence of an intelligent, well-judging woman, and to replace her habitual self-doubt with the conviction that she was worthy of attaching a man of serious merit, principles and character. Furthermore, she believed that he to whom she gave her hand, deserved to have her entire heart as well. She hoped that time and fortitude would do away with any tendency on her part to regard Edmund as more than a beloved cousin. While her girlish love for Edmund was by no means blameable, she was teaching herself to regard it as merely the natural consequence of having no other objects to love, other than he who had been her only childhood friend. She had been too apt, to the detriment of them both, to serve as the mirror for his opinions and beliefs, and by pursuing the new career offered to her by Mrs. Butters, she hoped to gain a greater knowledge of her own true self, before submerging that self in marriage. However, it remains to be seen what the determined Mrs. Butters will be able to bring about, in the fullness of time.

  Mr. Gibson, as all the world knows, became a literary lion with the publication of his book describing his adventures in fighting the slave trade. Subsequently he became a celebrated author of novels, which were unlike anything else offered to the public, for they described life in a fantastic future, where the monotonous but necessary chores needed to support civilized life were all performed by steam-powered machines, and thereby, slavery was no more!

  This story, as it closes, will not pretend to foretell so far into the distant future but wi
ll offer a few glimpses of the immediate years ahead:

  Julia Bertram, fond of activity, and missing the gardens of Mansfield Park, carried on with the plans for Thornton Lacey as delineated by Henry Crawford, and superintended the establishment of a small garden on the south-eastern slope beside the parsonage, a project which occupied several years, and which brought her great satisfaction.

  When her son was three years old, Maria Crawford took a house in London, where her beauty and wealth brought her many admirers, and it was generally believed that a second, and more successful, marriage would be her eventual reward for atoning for the one great error of her youth. Of her own free will, she brought little Henry to London to meet his great-uncle, the Admiral, who was charmed into acknowledging the dark-haired, clever, lively boy as a Crawford.

  As for Edmund’s estranged wife, she was often to be seen at Bath or at Brighton, a member of the Prince of Wales’ set, in the company of her good friend the Earl of Elsham. Her beauty and wit ensured that she was a favourite, and although she kept her fortune, as Edmund refused to make a claim on it, she also retained all her bitter regrets.

  Of all of the principals in this story, the one most often to contemplate ‘what if,’ was Edmund Bertram, whose most important decision—his choice of a wife—turned out to have such unhappy consequences. He blessed the suffering that made him more compassionate of others, the adage about the mote and the beam was always on his lips, but he could not help asking himself of an evening, while looking into the fire, what would have happened if that contrary wind across the Atlantic had not prevented his father’s ship from arriving home in time to stop the rehearsals of Lovers' Vows, or how might events have unfolded differently if Fanny had not left home, early that October morning?

  Foreword or Afterword

  For my part, I like Mansfield Park best. I recognize that its heroine is a little prig and its hero a pompous ass, but I do not care; it is wise, witty and tender, a masterpiece of ironical humour and subtle observation.

  — Somerset Maugham

  I usually just skim the forewords, don’t you? Or read the first few paragraphs, then skip on ahead to chapter one, feeling a bit lazy or guilty. To spare you, gentle reader, from the faintest whisper of self-reproach, I leave it to your inclination. Please feel free to read this before, after, or even not at all.

  I’ve been a Jane Austen devotee ever since my mother introduced Pride & Prejudice to me, and on one memorable Christmas she gave me a complete Penguin set of her books. Over the years, I have read and re-read Austen’s six novels, sometimes to find consolation in a distressed hour, but mostly because she left us only six novels, plus two fragments and her juvenilia, before her untimely death.

  For years, I thought about writing an ending to one of Austen’s two unfinished novels—this was before the internet—and before Colin Firth’s dive into a pond in 1995—when Austen fan fiction really exploded. But I discovered that it was Mansfield Park I returned to, and re-read and thought about the most. But why, considering that—in common with Jane Austen’s mother, I find Fanny Price an “insipid” heroine?

  Fanny Price, as anyone familiar with Jane Austen and her works knows, is the least popular of all the Austen heroines. Largely because of Fanny, “Mansfield Park is the least favourite novel of the six,” as Lorraine Clark, Associate Professor of English at Trent University in Ontario, acknowledges. “And yet the pleasures of Mansfield Park get deeper, and deeper and deeper on re-reading…. There’s a quiet, contemplative, meditative pleasure.”

  I’ll return to Fanny in a minute. She will wait right there on the bench for us, deeply anxious and unhappy, no doubt, but uncomplaining.

  Dr. Mary Breen, University College Cork, says “many critics believe [Mansfield Park is] the first great English novel….” and I believe this is not just because of Austen’s brilliant and subtle handling of the interactions of the characters through their dialogue, but because Austen is writing in a more somber and assured voice. There are a few passages in which I think I glimpse the emergence of new and even more powerful descriptive abilities, such as the following, when Austen describes the heroine sitting in the tiny, grimy parlour of her parents’ home in Portsmouth:

  [Fanny] was deep in other musing. The remembrance of her first evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper, came across her. No candle was now wanted. The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon. She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there; and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy, for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only a glare: a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by her father's head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even [the servant] Rebecca's hands had first produced it.

  In contrast to the “light, and bright, and sparkling” Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park is more serious and more reflective. Author Robert Rodi makes the point that in other Jane Austen novels, the villains and cads are not punished—they get off scot-free. Lucy Steele becomes the wealthy Mrs. Robert Ferrars, the seducer Wickham is paid off, and Mrs. Elton, General Tilney and William Elliott go about their merry ways. In Mansfield Park, Austen created a charming brother and sister team who hover on the brink of redemption, then destroy their own chances, and Maria Bertram, who is exiled to a small cottage with her aunt Norris. This outcome is closer to the formula for tragedy, rather than comedy, and certainly Mansfield Park has more of a dark, moralizing strain in it, thanks to those indefatigable moralizers, Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram.

  Yet, the novel is also filled with irresistible comic touches. The opening might seem staid, an exposition of the marriages made by three sisters, whom we don’t yet know and therefore can’t care much about, but the opening paragraph ends with this bit of quiet hilarity:

  Lady Bertram, who was a woman of very tranquil feelings, and a temper remarkably easy and indolent, would have contented herself with merely giving up her sister [for having made an imprudent marriage], and thinking no more of the matter; but Mrs. Norris had a spirit of activity, which could not be satisfied till she had written a long and angry letter to [this third sister], to point out the folly of her conduct, and threaten her with all its possible ill consequences. Mrs. Price, in her turn, was injured and angry; and an answer, which comprehended each sister in its bitterness, and bestowed such very disrespectful reflections on the pride of Sir Thomas as Mrs. Norris could not possibly keep to herself, put an end to all intercourse between them for a considerable period.

  Or here is Lady Bertram, who can always be relied upon to say something, all unawares, that punctures the delusions and hypocrisy of her older sister. Mrs. Norris is describing her nieces Maria and Julia as being perfect little angels, from whom Fanny will benefit just by being around:

  “That is exactly what I think,” cried Mrs. Norris, “and what I was saying to my husband this morning. It will be an education for the child, said I, only being with her cousins; if Miss Lee taught her nothing, she would learn to be good and clever from [Maria and Julia].”

  “I hope she will not tease my poor pug,” said Lady Bertram; “I have but just got Julia to leave it alone.”

  Or picture Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris gossiping about the wife of the new parson; Lady Bertram is surprised that such a plain woman has made such a good marriage, and Mrs. Norris thinks she’s an imprudent housekeeper. These opinions had been hardly canvassed a year before another event arose of such importance in the family, as might fairly claim some place in the thoughts and conversation o
f the ladies.

  It’s a leisurely book. For example, Austen uses over 2,300 words—almost the length of a short story—to discuss how Fanny will not go to live with Mrs. Norris in the White house after her husband dies. Or 14 paragraphs are devoted to an entertaining conversation about young ladies who change personalities when they “come out” in society, but it’s just a conversation, it’s not a plot point. However, in these passages, which are chiefly dialogue, Austen establishes characters and their relationships to one another. In the first passage I mentioned, we get our first sample of Edmund Bertram’s dry wit, and we learn that while he is intelligent, good-natured and kind, he sometimes wears rose-coloured glasses. We also become better acquainted with the selfish hypocrisy of Mrs. Norris and the complacency of her sister. In the second passage, Edmund is the plain-spoken third wheel in a witty exchange between Mary Crawford and his older brother Tom Bertram. This conversation helps us to appreciate the contrast between the brothers. We see Tom’s charm and superficiality versus Edmund’s quiet maturity.

  Let me go on record as saying that I like Edmund Bertram. He can be a prig, but he does have a nice quiet wit, and he is presented as the only one of the four Bertram siblings who is not totally selfish and self-absorbed. The exigencies of the plot require that he be blind to Henry Crawford’s seduction of his sisters, to Fanny’s love for him, and to Mary’s true character, so this puts him in the awkward position of being a bit of a dolt, really, but if we can forgive Emma Woodhouse for her blindness, we should be able to forgive Edmund Bertram.