Essays on Mansfield Park

The eighteenth-century novel seemed often to be the place in which people would attempt reform society. The novel gave writers a medium through which they could provide both entertainment and a place in which they could attempt to reform people’s views. Although often times these...

“All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players.” -As You Like It II.vii.139 A large portion of the plot of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Austen, 1814) describes the young gentlemen and ladies of the estate preparing a performance of the...

If ever Jane Austen set out to depict the moralistic chasm between Regency society and pre-Victorian propriety, she did so with Mansfield Park. To accomplish this, her characters are divided among these diverging ideologies. The majority succumb to their unscrupulous fancies while the few but...

In a letter to her brother dated 1814, Jane Austen boasted about a compliment she had received from a friend on her most recent work, Mansfield Park: “It’s the most sensible novel he’s ever read” (263). Austen prided herself on creating literature that depicted realistic...

While Edmund first shows himself to be compassionate and morally grounded as a character, he also shows that these qualities, as well as his own perceptions, are capable of being corrupted, mainly due to his romantic attachment to Miss Crawford in spite of her questionable...

Being Taken In How much of a role does deception play in courtship? In marriage? In Volume I of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Henry and Mary Crawford engage in a conversation with their sister, Mrs. Grant, concerning this very question. The conversation occurs soon after...

The novels of Jane Austen primarily reveal satirical glimpses into the inner workings of Nineteenth-century England’s upper classes. With a mocking overtone, the author ridicules the plight of young women as they desperately seek a worthy husband. Ultimately, the heroine happily weds the man whom...

A character’s views on morality and material gain seem to form the distinction between being a “good” or “bad” character in Austen’s novel Mansfield Park. By conducting a character analysis of Lady Bertram, Mary Crawford, and Sir Thomas, one can glean the true, didactic purpose...

Historically, during the late 1700s and 1800s, many pieces of literature as well as conduct books were written as a way to demonstrate how the conduct of how women should portray themselves as well as what a woman’s education should involve. Mary Wollstonecraft delivered her...

Female speech in Jane Austen’s novels is heavily dictated by the whims of her male characters, and although “[f]emale speech is never entirely repressed in Austen’s fiction, [it] is dictated so as to mirror or otherwise reassure masculine desire” (Johnson 37). However, there are times...

Literary movements of the early nineteenth century were undeniably, at least to some extent, defined by a backdrop of wartime context. It was a time period not only caught up in the midst of the Napoleonic War, but also still suffering from the aftermath of...