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Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations, Fanny is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, world. But Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the reader alike. In her Introduction, Carol Shields writes, [Mansfield Park's] overriding theme is difficult to isolate, since the novel is about everything it touches upon: nurturing, steadfastness, belonging and not belonging, about fine gradations of moral persuasion, about human noise and silence, and about action and stillness.
There Are Few Amusements More Dangerous For An Author Than The Indulgence In Ironic Descriptions Of His Own Work. If The Irony Is Depreciatory, Posterity Is But Too Likely To Say, "Many A True Word Is Spoken In Jest;" If It Is Encomiastic, The Same Ruthless And Ungrateful Critic Is But Too Likely To Take It As An Involuntary Confession Of Folly And Vanity. But When Fielding, In One Of His Serio-Comic Introductions To Tom Jones, Described It As "This Prodigious Work," He All Unintentionally (For He Was The Least Pretentious Of Men) Anticipated The Verdict Which Posterity Almost At Once, And With Ever-Increasing Suffrage Of The Best Judges As Time Went On, Was About To Pass Not Merely Upon Thi...