Why is Mansfield Park Jane Austen’s worst book? - Put yourself in Miss Crawford's place, Fanny.

Oh, there are so many reasons.  The priggishness of the heroine, Fanny Price, for example; the priggishness of one of the male romantic leads, Edmund Bertram.  There are a couple of scenes where they lecture each other on the faulty sense of duty of other people (not each other, not themselves), where even I thought boy, you two deserve each other.  Just be warned that at least one of your children will get so fed up with your righteousness that he’ll run off to join the circus.

My title question often turns into something ruder – “Why do so many people read Mansfield Park so badly?”  Sarah Emsley argues that readers mistake a tragedy for a comedy.  I cannot accept this as the answer, since I, too, take the book as a comedy, primarily because it is written in a comic tone, excepting those dreary lectures mentioned just above.  I laugh all the way through;  I even laugh at Fanny’s alcohol problem (“Never had Fanny more wanted a cordial,” Ch. 46).

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single reader in possession of the wrong idea about a book is reluctant to let it go.  So readers convinced for some reason that Mansfield Park is a romance – meaning the kind of book about troubles of the heart we now label romances – often persist in the notion that it is that kind of romance even when the text fails to do the things romances commonly do.  In this sense, Mansfield Park is a mediocre romance novel.  It botches the proposal scene.  A lot of what might seem like the primary action occurs offstage at the end, communicated to Fanny by letter.

I see now, though, that much of the confusion is built into the novel by Austen, likely deliberately.  I have written as if it is obvious that Fanny Price is the heroine of Mansfield Park.  It would be perfectly reasonable for the reader not previously warned to assume that Mary Crawford was the primary heroine.  She is introduced early in the novel, in Chapter 4, the outside observer at Mansfield Park.  Fanny Price, the poor cousin, has by this point lived there for many years, so how can she be the outsider?

Fanny is quiet, Mary is loud.  Fanny is a prig, Mary is fun and funny, more fun and smarter than the other women at Mansfield Park.  She is self-centered and snobbish, but what is the novel for if not to correct those flaws?  If I have picked Mary as the heroine, I might wonder why the point of view shifts to Fanny Price so often, but Fanny is apparently going to be a foil to Mary, and anyway the point of view moves around a lot.  Fanny will provide the B-plot, in which she will likely learn to assert her strength of character against the family that has mistreated and misunderstood her.

I think it would be possible to carry this idea at least halfway through the novel.  Mary will end up marrying, by the way, Fanny’s sailor brother William, overcoming her snobbishness etc. in the name of love etc.  See Chapter 24, and follow the theme of the loaned horse.

Around this point, Mary Crawford drops away and Fanny’s point of view takes over to the extent that Austen moves Fanny to a new setting with entirely new characters, as if to make even the stubbornest reader admit that the book is now permanently and fully Fanny’s, and has therefore been Fanny’s story all along.  “You have shown yourself very, very different from anything that I had imagined,” as one of the character’s says to Fanny in Chapter 32.

I take all of this as a testament to Austen’s ingenuity at storytelling and structuring a novel, the way she keeps so many possibilities alive for so long, long enough for readers to make guesses and develop preferences, some of which will be disappointed.  Readers are perhaps not reading badly but instead really entering the spirit of the thing.

The title is from Chapter 16, completely out of context.