‘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 reader 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. ‘I beleive whenever the 3d appears, I shall not even attempt to tell Lies about it’ (L, p. 231) – in fact she continued to guard the secret as much as she could. It is not absolutely clear when she began the work, in 1811 or 1812, but it was concluded in the summer of 1813. Unlike Northanger Abbey, for whose datedness she would later apologise, and despite some dispute about its precise time, it is intended as contemporary or near contemporary in reference and analysis. Austen was concerned to get right even peripheral details, seeking to know whether there was a Government or Commissioner's House in Gibraltar and whether Northampton had hedgerows.