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The final one (just in the order I’ve read them!) of the six completed books completed by Austen, and I really loved it! I really warmed to Fanny Price more than I have when watching film adaptations. I’m most familiar with the 1999 film for which I can only find this trailer, which makes it seem far more American than it is! But the book has so much more to it, which is standard, and some things that just happened completely differently.

Fanny is originally from Portsmouth, in a family with not a lot of money, but age 10 is sent to live with her wealthy relatives in Mansfield Park, and the majority of the book takes place when she’s maybe 18ish, so has spent a good chunk of her life there. Because of this, there are some negative comments about Portsmouth in the book, which I couldn’t help but enjoy!

• “Her daughters were very much confined; Portsmouth was a very sad place; they did not often get out.”
• “How her heart swelled with joy and gratitude as she passed the barriers [out] of Portsmouth.”

Of course, Austen lived a long time ago, and so you do have to get over various cultural norms of the time, not least of which is cousins getting married being completely normal: “It began to strike him […] whether it might not be possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love.”

It took me a long time, as these books tend to do, but the further I got through it, the more I was finding moments to read a few more pages, I really enjoyed it.

Some other bits that made me fold down page corners:

• “Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
• “You seemed almost as fearful of notice and praise as other women were of neglect.”
• “She does not think evil, but she speaks it, speaks it in playfulness; and thought I know it to be playfulness, it grieves me to the soul.”
• “I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence.”
• “Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.”