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…

Part One in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

It was my interest in Nova Scotia history that led me to a discovery of Edith Wharton and her fiction. Not because Wharton had any interest in Nova Scotia, but because the poet Helen Pinkerton visited my family in Halifax when I was eighteen, and I took her to see the Halifax Citadel. Her thank you gift to me, for which I will always be grateful, was the Library of America edition of Wharton’s novels The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Age of Innocence, and The Custom of the Country.

I read The House of Mirth first, and when I later read The Custom of the Country, I was struck by the contrast between the plot of the former, with Lily Bart’s decline, and that of the…