Austen: Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park
Jane Austen
(Everyman, 1992) [1814]
536 p.

My daughter asked a few months ago where she might find our copy of Mansfield Park. “On the shelves at the foot of the stairs. First bookcase, top shelf,” was my ready answer. “It’s not there,” was hers. On inspection, she was right. Puzzled, I checked our home library catalogue and discovered, to my surprise, that we didn’t have it. Looking at my reading log, I then found, to my even greater surprise, that I’d apparently never read it. How it was that I had come to know Fanny Price without reading her book is a bit of a mystery, but, anyway, I resolved to read the book at my earliest opportunity. And here I am.

Novel writing is an art, not a science, and while there might be ways to turn a crank and generate something serviceable, there’s no such method in the realm of high artistic achievement. Even if one can succeed sometimes, there is no guarantee that the muse will sing and the spark catch flame every time. Mansfield Park, I fear to say, is evidence of this. It was Austen’s third published novel, coming between Pride and Prejudice and Emma, two of the great novels of the nineteenth century, and one might expect, as I did, that it would be similarly wonderful.

And of course it is, in many respects, similar. It exhibits for us the world of the English gentility; it illustrates Austen’s marvellous eye for nuances of character and her precise ear for describing them; it provides us with a tangle of ill-matched romances that eventually resolve, for our heroine at least, in a most satisfying way. It has the right ingredients.

But somehow it still, for me, fell short of being wonderful. This particular set of characters just didn’t come alive as they usually do. Austen’s plotting, which is, on other occasions, such a marvel of economy and sure judgement, here seemed strangely meandering and inconsequential. (That play!) For the first time in Austen’s world I found myself understanding the complaint that her stories are merely drawing-room tales formed of a thin tissue of incidents of little consequence. Normally I regard such criticisms as coarse and superficial; in this case, though, maybe there’s something to them?

Part of the problem may be Miss Fanny Price herself, who largely failed to take shape in my imagination. Even here, at the end of the novel, she feels oddly inert and faceless. I could not fall in love with her as I could (and did, and do) with Elizabeth Bennett, or laugh lovingly at her as I do at Emma Woodhouse. And the supporting cast, too, felt distant and undifferentiated. The one exception to this rule was Mrs Norris, Fanny’s deliciously selfish aunt, whose every appearance was a reliable occasion for comic relief.

It’s hard for me to be disappointed with a novel by Jane Austen. She’s one of our great writers, and I admire her tremendously. I’d much rather blame myself, and of course that might be the just thing, for I have been pressed by circumstance and the cares of the world as I’ve tried to read. But I don’t think so, not entirely.

***

[Fanny visits my house]
The living in incessant noise was, to a frame and temper delicate and nervous like Fanny’s, an evil which no superadded elegance or harmony could have entirely atoned for. It was the greatest misery of all. At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody’s feelings were consulted. If tenderness could be ever supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place; and as to the little irritations sometimes introduced by aunt Norris, they were short, they were trifling, they were as a drop of water to the ocean, compared with the ceaseless tumult of her present abode. Here everybody was noisy, every voice was loud (excepting, perhaps, her mother’s, which resembled the soft monotony of Lady Bertram’s, only worn into fretfulness). Whatever was wanted was hallooed for, and the servants hallooed out their excuses from the kitchen. The doors were in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could command attention when they spoke.