6 - Mansfield Park
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
‘I have something in hand – which I hope on the credit of P. & P. will sell well, tho’ not half so entertaining', wrote Jane Austen in September 1813 (L, p. 217). Her decision not to repeat the ‘entertaining’ formula of her most successful book suggests that, in Mansfield Park, she was aiming at something beyond easy approval. The work opens with an intertextual allusion to Pride and Prejudice, which she was probably revising while writing the new book – ‘There certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them’ – but the contrast of the two novels exceeds the resemblance. In Mansfield Park a greater sense of the influence of place and circumstance on the insecure personality diminishes the pure delight in comic character, while the sprightly dialogue of Pride and Prejudice disappears before purposeful discussion of clerical duties and land improvement.
The third novel to be published, Mansfield Park was the first to be started after Jane Austen had settled in Chawton and was establishing herself as a professional writer. It was printed by Egerton and then Murray, the move to this fashionable publisher confirming that its author was aiming less for circulating libraries than for buyers intending to keep and reread. Her authorship was becoming known: ‘[T]he truth is that the Secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the Shadow of a secret now’, she wrote.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen , pp. 75 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006