When timid, ten-year-old Fanny Price is plucked from her large, raucous and somewhat impoverished family in Portsmouth to live with wealthy relatives in Mansfield Park her life is changed for ever. Immediately forming a strong attraction for her cousin Edmund, she develops into a genteel and mature young woman, whose love for him remains undimmed despite the diversion brought into both their lives by the attractive but morally bankrupt Crawfords. With its suggestion of adultery, and written with all the wit and style of the mature Jane Austen, this is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers. It was published in 1814, and unlike its predecessors, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility which were revisions of her juvenile writing, Mansfield Park was completely original. Like its heroine Fanny Price, who develops during the course of the story to reach maturity, Jane Austen’s third published novel was a much more mature work from a writer of increasing experience.
