Abstract
Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s Vanity Fair. Almost everyone in it is selfish: self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and vain. This helps make it her most unpleasant novel — and her most controversial. For years critics have exercised themselves trying to explain, justify, expound, or attack its moral slant. Misreadings of the book by otherwise sensible men and women are legion: Mansfield Park “continually and essentially holds up the vicious as admirable,” says Kingsley Amis.1 Commentators complacently discuss the expulsion of wit and scourging of irony in Mansfield Park, pronounce Fanny Price a failure, and conclude that the novel as a whole must be one too. The book is supposed somehow to be “different” — not at all, really, Jane Austen’s sort of thing, and thus requiring a good deal of explanation.
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