As Fanny grows up, she falls in love with her cousin Edmund;
but he only has eyes for pretty, witty Mary Crawford. At first Mary, who is on
the look-out for a rich husband, sets her sights on Tom. She ‘had felt an early
presentiment that she should like the eldest best. She knew it was her way’.
But when she turns her attention to Edmund, she is surprised
and alarmed because he plans to earn his living as a clergyman: ‘There is
generally an uncle or a grandfather to leave a fortune to the second son’.
Meanwhile, Fanny is growing up. Her first ball at Mansfield
Park was: ‘the thought only of the afternoon, built on the late acquisition of
a violin player in the servants’ hall, and the possibility of raising five
couple’. It was, however, ‘a very happy one’ for Fanny as she danced four times
with her cousin Edmund.
Mansfield Park is the most obviously Johnsonian of Jane Austen’s works. Dr Johnson’s uncompromising moral outlook and Fanny Price’s are strikingly similar at times, although the timid heroine, unlike Johnson, usually shrinks from making her true feelings clear. Moralising has acquired ‘priggish,’ dull overtones for many modern readers, who find Fanny difficult to empathise with.
But in the more religious age that Austen lived in, thinking
and talking about people’s moral values was far more common, and Jane received some favourable comments on Fanny's character from friends and family. Near the end of
the novel, Edmund Bertram comments: ‘Fanny is the only one who has judged
rightly throughout, who has been consistent’.
Will the worldly Mary Crawford marry Edmund? Will her handsome brother Henry seduce Fanny’s affections from Edmund? You’ll have to read the novel to find out...
Will the worldly Mary Crawford marry Edmund? Will her handsome brother Henry seduce Fanny’s affections from Edmund? You’ll have to read the novel to find out...
Illustration: A young man proposes marriage. Pocket
Magazine, 1820.
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