Mansfield Park
Unabridged Large Print Edition
by Jane Austen
This quality large print edition is not a machine scanned or facsimile “blowup” of an older edition. Edited and formatted by human editors, it is printed on heavyweight bright white paper with a fully laminated cover.
Mansfield Park…
Mansfield Park was Jane Austen’s third novel, first published in 1814. Characterized by Austen’s dry wit and biting satire, its tone and discussion of religion and religious duty, propriety and morality, obedience, privacy, and adultery has resulted in its description as both the most serious and mature and the most problematic of Austen’s novels.
The novel tells the story of Fanny Price, starting when her overburdened family sends her at the age of ten to live in the country house of her wealthy aunt and uncle and follows the development this self-effacing and disregarded cousin into early adulthood, as her moral strength eventually wins her complete acceptance by the Bertram family.
While the novel contains scant references to slavery, many modern commenters have obsessed over the implication that the family’s wealth derives from an overseas sugar plantation and decried Austen’s failure to work major anti-slavery themes into the book. Austen herself is known to have strongly disapproved of slavery, and this apparent ambivalence is in keeping with her belief that it was not the business of writers to tell people what to do, but to prompt them reach their own conclusions. The important conversations between Fanny and Mary Crawford do not really provide the reader with final conclusions, and the entirety of the novel is deliberately somewhat indeterminate.
About the Author: Jane Austen
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Hampshire, England into a family at the lowest tier of the English landed gentry.
With the exception of a short period at a boarding school and visits to a brother who was, for a time, a London banker, Austen lived her entire life within a close-knit family group very much like the gentry who make up the characters of her novels, mainly located in the countryside very much like the settings of her novels. In a cruelly ironic twist, Austen’s family would suffer the fate feared by Mrs. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice” when her father died, unexpectedly in 1805, leaving his wife and unmarried daughters destitute and dependent upon her brothers for support.
In her 30s, Jane started to anonymously publish her works. Between 1811-16, she published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice (a work she referred to as her “darling child,” which also received critical acclaim), Mansfield Park and Emma. Authorship was attributed to “A Woman”.
She found modest critical and financial success in her lifetime, but by 1830 her books had been out of print for a decade when the copyrights were purchased and new illustrated editions included in Richard Bentley’s popular “Standard Novels” series. With wider exposure they gained popularity and sold steadily if not spectacularly. Throughout the 19th century Austen’s work had an admiring following among Britain’s self-proclaimed “literary elite,” but it was not until the early twentieth century that her novels became the object of academic studies as “great literature”.
Austen’s work was part of the transition to realism in 19th century British literature, and her romantic fiction, set mainly among the gentry of the English countryside was marked by dry wit, satire, and sharp social commentary, often directed at the unfairness of the British legal and cultural systems that left women virtually entirely dependent upon marriage and family for social standing and economic security.
In 1816, at the age of 41, Jane’s health began to deteriorate. She made efforts to continue working, editing older works and starting a new novel called The Brothers, unfinished but published after her death as Sanditon. She died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, Hampshire, England.
Product details
ASIN: B0D2QRDY1H
Publisher: S. M. Holden (April 25, 2024)
Language: English
Paperback: 605 pages
ISBN: 979-8879841138
Item Weight: 2.91 pounds
Dimensions: 7.44 x 1.37 x 9.69 inches
3.9 on Goodreads 355,055 ratings
List Price: $24.97
