by Jane Austen
Saturday, February 11 William’s ship sails
It was “within four days” of his arrival.
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Thursday, February 16 (probable) Mary writes to Fanny
She says Henry left for Norfolk ten days ago.
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Saturday, February 25 Edmund travels to London
Henry (see below) says Edmund came a few days before Henry himself. Later Edmund says he was there three weeks, and he left on a Saturday (p. 756).
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Tuesday, February 28 Maria’s first London party
Mentioned in Mary’s letter to Fanny.
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Wednesday, March 1 (assuming no leap year) Henry returns to London
He says he spent “scarcely twenty-four hours” in London until he traveled to Portsmouth, and both journeys would take all day.
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Friday, March 3 Henry travels from London to Portsmouth this page
Saturday, March 4 Henry visits Fanny
Stated to be a Saturday (p. 722).
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Sunday, March 5 Henry sees Fanny again this page
Monday, March 6 Henry returns to London this page
Wednesday, March 8 Fanny receives letter from Mary this page
Tuesday, March 14 Henry sees Maria at Mrs. Fraser’s party
Mary mentions it being this date in her letter to Fanny (p. 748).
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Saturday, March 18 Edmund returns to Mansfield from London
See next event for dating.
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Friday, March 24 (rough estimate) Fanny receives letter from Edmund
He wrote it after he returned to Mansfield, perhaps several days later. “Seven weeks” are “very nearly gone” in Fanny’s absence from Mansfield, which started on Monday, February 6.
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Monday, March 27 The Grants leave for Bath this page
Same Day, or a Day or Two Later Fanny learns of Tom’s illness
This was “Within a few days from the receipt of Edmund’s letter.”
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Beginning of April Edmund brings Tom home
Lady Bertram, in her letter to Fanny, says this will happen “shortly” (p. 766).
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Early to Mid-April Tom begins to improve
“At about the week’s end from his return.”
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Mid- to Late April Mr. Rushworth in Bath; Henry seeing Maria
It is around Easter, which was late (p. 774).
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Late April Fanny still in Portsmouth, wanting to leave this page
End of April Fanny receives a letter from Mary about Tom
This occurs a week before Mary’s next letter (p. 786)—see below.
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End of April/Early May Increasing intimacy between Maria and Henry this page
Early May Sir Thomas’s friend Mr. Harding writes to him about danger; Sir Thomas prepares to act this page
Thursday, May 5 (probable date) Maria and Henry run away together Mr. Rushworth agitated, talks to Mr. Harding; latter sends express message to Sir Thomas
This likely happened on the same day; Mary speaks of “Rushworth’s folly” in her letter to Fanny—see next two entries.
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Mary writes to Fanny about scandalous rumor
The day of the week can be established from subsequent events; the date is a logical guess, based upon Fanny’s arriving in Portsmouth on February 7, and two days after this, her having “been three months there” (p. 788).
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Friday, May 6 Fanny receives letter from Mary
Julia elopes with Mr. Yates
They left “a few hours before” Sir Thomas and Edmund arrived.
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Sir Thomas and Edmund travel to London
Edmund, writing to Fanny on Monday, says they have been two days in London; he presumably counts only the two full days there.
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Saturday, May 7 Fanny sees newspaper story about scandal involving Maria and Henry
This was the next day (p. 788).
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Between Saturday and Tuesday Edmund sees Mary
While he is in London; day not specified.
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Monday, May 8 Edmund writes to Fanny this page
Tuesday, May 9 Fanny receives letter from Edmund
This was three days after hearing of the affair.
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Edmund leaves for Portsmouth in evening on overnight mail coach this page
Wednesday, May 10 Edmund arrives, leaves with Fanny and Susan this page
Thursday, May 11 They arrive at Mansfield
It is the next day; later said to be Thursday (p. 814).
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Sunday, May 12 Fanny and Edmund talk about Mary this page
Summer Edmund recovers some of his cheerfulness
Henry and Maria separate
“A very few months had taught him” to regret Fanny, by contrast with Maria (p. 840).
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Autumn Dr. Grant gets a position in London
Previously the absence of the Grants from Mansfield was “for some months purposely lengthened.”
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Maria and Mrs. Norris go to live in a remote location this page
Mr. Rushworth procures a divorce
Autumn is a guess.
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Late in the Year, or Early Next Year Edmund and Fanny marry
The interval of time is deliberately left vague. This estimate seems logical.
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A Year Later (estimate) Fanny is pregnant; Dr. Grant dies; Edmund and Fanny move back to Mansfield
This would be year twenty-nine or thirty, depending on the exact lengths of time before the marriage, and between that and the pregnancy and return to Mansfield.
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It is improbable that Jane Austen followed an exact calendar in composing Mansfield Park. If she had, she would have used the calendars for 1808 and 1809, for 1808 was the most recent year prior to the composition (in 1812–1813) that contained a Thursday, December 22, the one specific day and date in the novel. But the novel also states that the following Easter was “particularly late,” whereas Easter of 1809 was early, on April 2. Moreover, there is every indication that Jane Austen, as in all her novels, intended the story to occur contemporaneously with its composition. Hence it is likely she selected the one specific date arbitrarily, and otherwise imagined the action according to general knowledge of the sequence of the year and intervals of time.
Reference
The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, vol. 3, edited by R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1933).
Bibliography
EDITIONS OF MANSFIELD PARK
Chapman, R. W., ed., The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. III: Mansfield Park (Oxford, 1934)
Johnson, Claudia, ed., Mansfield Park: A Norton Critical Edition (New York, 1998)
Wiltshire, John, ed., The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Mansfield Park (Cambridge, 2005)
WORKS BY JANE AUSTEN
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge, 2005–2009)
Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford, 2011)
The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, 6 vols., ed. by R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1988)
WORKS RELATING TO JANE AUSTEN
Biographical
Austen, Caroline, Reminiscences of Caroline Austen (Guildford, Surrey, 1986)
Austen-Leigh, J. E., A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections (Oxford, 2002; originally published 1871)
Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record, revised and enlarged by Deirdre Le Faye (Boston, 1989)
Byrne, Paula, The Re
al Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (New York, 2013)
Harman, Claire, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (Edinburgh, 2009)
Le Faye, Deirdre, Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels (New York, 2002)
Llewelyn, Margaret, Jane Austen: A Character Study (London, 1977)
Ross, Josephine, Jane Austen: A Companion (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003)
Tomalin, Claire, Jane Austen: A Life (New York, 1997)
Tucker, George Holbert, Jane Austen’s Family (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1998)
———, Jane Austen the Woman (New York, 1994)
Wilson, Kim, At Home with Jane Austen (New York, 2014)
Critical
Auerbach, Emily, Searching for Jane Austen (Madison, WI, 2004)
Bush, Douglas, Jane Austen (New York, 1975)
Butler, Marilyn, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975)
Cecil, Lord David, A Portrait of Jane Austen (New York, 1979)
Cockshut, A. O. J., Man and Woman: A Study of Love and the Novel, 1740–1940 (New York, 1978)
Colby, R. A., Fiction with a Purpose: Major and Minor Nineteenth-Century Novels (Bloomington, IN, 1967)
Craik, W. A., Jane Austen: The Six Novels (London, 1965)
Devlin, D. D., Jane Austen and Education (London, 1975)
Donoghue, Denis, England, Their England: Commentaries on English Language and Literature (Berkeley, 1988)
Duckworth, Alistair M., The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore, 1971)
Emsley, Sarah, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York, 2005)
Fleishman, Avrom, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Baltimore, 1977)
Gooneratne, Yasmine, Jane Austen (Cambridge, 1970)
Grey, J. David, ed., The Jane Austen Companion (New York, 1986)
Hardy, Barbara, A Reading of Jane Austen (New York, 1979)
Horwitz, Barbara, Jane Austen and the Question of Women’s Education (New York, 1991)
Jenkyns, Richard, A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen (New York, 2004)
Lascelles, Mary, Jane Austen and Her Art (Oxford, 1939)
Littlewood, Ian, ed., Jane Austen: Critical Assessmemts, 4 vols. (Mountfield, East Sussex, 1998)
Lodge, David, Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (New York, 1966)
Mandal, Anthony, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2007)
Moler, Kenneth L., Jane Austen’s Art of Illusion (Lincoln, NE, 1968)
Mooneyham, Laura, Romance, Language and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels (New York, 1988)
Morini, Massimiliano, Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis (Farnham, Surrey, 2009)
Morris, Ivor, Jane Austen and the Interplay of Character (London, 1999)
Mullan, John, What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty Puzzles Solved (New York, 2012)
Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature (New York, 1980)
Nardin, Jane, Those Elegant Decorums: The Concept of Propriety in Jane Austen’s Novels (Albany, NY, 1973)
Odmark, John, An Understanding of Jane Austen’s Novels (Oxford, 1981)
Pollock, Walter, Jane Austen: Her Contemporaries and Herself (London, 1899)
Roberts, Warren, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York, 1979)
Ruderman, Anne C., The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen (Lanham, MD, 1995)
Scheuermann, Mona, Reading Jane Austen (New York, 2009)
Scott, P. J. M., Jane Austen (London, 1982)
Southam, B. C., ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London, 1968–87)
Sutherland, John, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction (New York, 1997)
Tave, Stuart, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago, 1973)
Villard, Léonie, Jane Austen: A French Appreciation (London, 1924)
Watt, Ian, ed., Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963)
Weisenfarth, Joseph, The Errand of Form: An Assay of Jane Austen’s Art (New York, 1967)
WORKS OF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
General Histories and Reference
Adkins, Roy and Lesley, Jane Austen’s England (New York, 2013)
Burton, Elizabeth, The Pageant of Georgian England (New York, 1967)
Craik, W. A., Jane Austen in Her Time (London, 1969)
Daunton, M. J., Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995)
Fullerton, Susannah, Jane Austen and Crime (Madison, WI, 2006)
Halevy, Elie, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. I: England in 1815, translated by E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker, 2nd ed. (London, 1949)
Harvey, A. D., Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978)
Hole, Christina, English Home-Life, 1500–1800 (London, 1947)
Jaeger, Muriel, Before Victoria: Changing Standards & Behaviour (London, 1956)
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982)
Olsen, Kirstin, All Things Austen: An Encyclopedia of Austen’s World, 2 vols. (Westport, CT, 2005)
Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, rev. ed. (London, 1990)
Quinlan, Maurice J., Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners (Hamden, CT, 1965)
Rule, John, Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (London, 1992)
Todd, Janet, ed., Jane Austen in Context (New York, 2005)
Uglow, Jenny, In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s War, 1793–1815 (New York, 2014)
White, R. J., Life in Regency England (London, 1963)
Language of the Period
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1971)
Johnson, Samuel, Dictionary of the English Language, ed. by Alexander Chalmers (London, 1994; reprint of 1843 ed.)
Lane, Maggie, Jane Austen and Names (Bristol, 2002)
Page, Norman, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1972)
Phillipps, K. C., Jane Austen’s English (London, 1970)
Pinion, F. B., A Jane Austen Companion (London, 1973)
Schapera, I., Kinship Terminology in Jane Austen’s Novels (London, 1977)
Stokes, Myra, The Language of Jane Austen: A Study of Some Aspects of Her Vocabulary (New York, 1991)
Tucker, Susie, Protean Shape: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary and Usage (London, 1967)
Cultural and Literary Background
Bradbrook, Frank W., Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge, 1966)
Bredvold, Louis I., The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit, 1962)
Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997)
Feingold, Richard, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978)
Foster, James, The History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (New York, 1949)
Gaull, Marilyn, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York, 1988)
Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York, 2008)
Jones, Ann H., Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen’s Age (New York, 1986)
Kelly, Gary, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London, 1989)
McCalman, Iain, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832 (Oxford, 1999)
Spadafora, David, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, 1990)
Sweet, Rosemary, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004)
Tompkins, Joyce, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (Lincoln, NE, 1961)
Irish Stereotypes
Edgeworth, Richard Lovell and
Maria, Essay on Irish Bulls (London, 1802)
Truninger, Annelise, Paddy and the Paycock: A Study of the Stage Irishman from Shakespeare to O’Casey (Bern, 1976)
Shakespeare
Franklin, Colin, Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth-Century Editions (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1991)
Marder, Louis, His Exits and Entrances: The Story of Shakespeare’s Reputation (Philadelphia, 1963)
Smith, David Nichol, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1928; 1967 reprint)
Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York, 1989)
Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare: For All Time (Oxford, 2003)
Marriage and the Family
Bailey, Joanne, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2003)
Fletcher, Anthony, Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood, 1600–1914 (New Haven, 2008)
Harvey, A. D., Sex in Georgian England: Attitudes and Prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s (New York, 1994)
Jones, Hazel, Jane Austen and Marriage (London, 2009)
Lane, Maggie, Growing Older with Jane Austen (London, 2014)
Probert, Rebecca, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge, 2009)
Selwyn, David, Jane Austen and Children (London, 2010)
Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977)
———, The Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990)
Tadmor, Naomi, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001)
Trumbach, Randolph, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1978)
Wolfram, Sybil, In-Laws and Outlaws: Kinship and Marriage in England (Beckenham, Kent, 1987)
The Position of Women
Barker, Hannah, and Elaine Chalus, eds., Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850: An Introduction (London, 2005)
Martin, Joanna, Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House (London, 2004)
Shoemaker, Robert B., Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London, 1998)
Tague, Ingrid H., Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2002)