Mary C. M. Phillips

“About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northamptonshire, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.”

The first sentence of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is nowhere near as famous as the first line of Pride and Prejudice. The heroine of Mansfield Park is nowhere near as beloved as Elizabeth Bennet. The novel is rarely chosen as anyone’s favourite Austen novel – I recently heard it described (by a Janeite who shall remain nameless!) as “my 6th favorite Austen.” But even though it doesn’t have the same kind of sparkle as Pride and Prejudice, it’s a complex, fascinating, brilliant book.

This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the publication…