Mansfield Park

Sent at the age of ten from her crowded, struggling family to be raised by wealthy relations at Mansfield Park, Fanny Price grows up half-adopted and half-servant — loved a little, used a good deal, looked down upon by her cousins and bullied by her aunt, and quietly devoted to Edmund, the one Bertram who is kind to her. She is poor, dependent, and almost powerless, and her only strength is a refusal to do what she believes to be wrong.

Into this settled world come Henry and Mary Crawford, a brilliant and worldly brother and sister whose charm sets every heart at Mansfield spinning and draws out, one by one, the moral weaknesses of nearly everyone around them. When Sir Thomas is away overseeing his estates abroad, the young people stage a daring play, Lovers' Vows, that becomes a rehearsal for real transgression — and Fanny, who alone refuses a part, is the only one who sees clearly what the game is doing.

Mansfield Park is Austen's gravest and most divisive book. Where her other heroines sparkle, Fanny watches; the novel sets charm against conscience and dares to ask whether the person who is right is also the person we like. Beneath its country-house comedy runs a darker thread — the Antigua plantation that funds Mansfield, and the famous “dead silence” that meets Fanny's question about the slave trade — that has made the book a centre of modern debate.

Quiet, exact, and morally unsparing, Mansfield Park refuses to flatter its reader. It asks whether we can love goodness that does not entertain, and whether the glamour we are drawn to is the same thing as the integrity we ought to admire.