Mansfield Park

Kathleen James-Cavan is an assistant professor and Graduate Chair of the
English Department at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the editor
of Sense and Sensibility.

Continuing in the tradition of the Broadview Literary Texts series, June
Sturrock presents a judiciously annotated edition of Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park, along with an introductory essay and appendixes
containing selections of primary documents pertaining to the novel’s
cultural context. The cover, intentionally anachronistic, aptly
represents a dour young woman posing before a tawdry photographer’s
backdrop, apparently commenting simultaneously on Fanny Price’s
unhappiness and the artificiality of Mansfield Park. The frontispiece,
however, reproduces the portrait of Austen that first appeared in the
1870 memoir, an excessively enhanced version of Cassandra’s c. 1810
line drawing. This edition will appeal to teachers of English literature
at all levels as well as to readers with a general interest in
Austen’s works.

The introduction alerts readers to the complexities of the novel’s
themes of power and money evident, for example, in the representations
of Fanny Price and women’s education, Sir Thomas Bertram’s domestic
and West Indian tyranny, and the provision of plausible “alternative
narratives.” Readers often dislike Fanny Price for her conventionality
but Sturrock suggests that while Fanny is admirable, she is not ideal;
she is “bookish” and “silly” and the narrator “laughs
gently” at her. In contrast to Edward Said’s provocative essay on
the novel, Sturrock argues that through references to the slave trade
Sir Thomas is connected to large-scale brutality and injustice echoed in
his treatment of his niece and daughters.

Unfortunately, this otherwise careful introduction overlooks the
history of the novel’s appearance in print, an omission highlighted by
the appearance on page 33 of the 1814 title page contradicting the
“Note on the Text” that identifies the edition as deriving from the
corrected second edition of 1816. This is a significant substitution
because by 1815 Austen had turned to John Murray, who published the
corrected second edition of Mansfield Park as well as Emma. Also missing
from the “Note on the Text” are the details about the silent
correction of a “minimum of obvious errors.” One of these, a
sentence R.W. Chapman calls the crux of Mansfield Park, remains
unemended and unnoticed: “And, alas! How always known no principle to
supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in!”