Jane Austen and the Importance of Being Wrong‪.‬

"The pursuit of the incorrigible is one of the most venerable bugbears in the history of philosophy."--J. L. Austin (1) IN JANE AUSTEN'S MANSFIELD PARK (1814), FANNY PRICE LEAVES HER AUNTS, uncle, and cousins with whom she has been visiting at their estate, Mansfield Park, and returns to visit her considerably worse off parents and siblings in Portsmouth. She is unpleasantly surprised by what she finds there. This is not the happy reunion she had hoped for--the relief from "fear," "restraint," and "reproach" from which she had suffered in the company of her wealthy relations. (2) Instead, she discovers that a return to her immediate family procedures only further discomfort and anxiety--at best only mixed "emotions of pain and pleasure" (318). Filled with "apprehension and flutter," alternately "shocked" and "fatigued" by the ceaseless bustle in her parents' home, she experiences emotions that are the very reverse of what she expected to feel amongst those nearest to her by birth, leading her to reconsider what they mean to her, and what she means to them (312, 320-21). A few chapters later, she is as anxious to leave her parents and siblings--to be "release[d]" from them with great relief--as she was to visit them (346).