Mansfield Park

Description

Aged ten, Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthier relations, the Bertrams, at Mansfield Park. However, life there is not as she imagined. Treated with disdain by three of her cousins, she finds her only comfort in the kindness of the fourth, Edmund. As they grow, their friendship develops into romantic love - until the arrival of Henry Crawford and his charming sister Mary causes an emotional upheaval that no one in the family expects. With psychological insight and sparkling wit, Jane Austen paints an irresistibly lifelike portrait of shifting values and split loyalties. This gorgeous edition of Mansfield Park is delightfully illustrated by the celebrated Hugh Thomson and includes an afterword by historian and author Nigel Cliff. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Jane Austen was born in 1775 in rural Hampshire, the daughter of an affluent village rector who encouraged her in her artistic pursuits. In novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma she developed her subtle analysis of contemporary life through depictions of the middle-classes in small towns. Her sharp wit and incisive portraits of ordinary people have given her novels enduring popularity. She died in 1817.

I can't leave Mansfield Park alone. When driving or washing dishes or folding laundry, I turn on an audio version and listen, and I keep the little speckled copy of the text near me at all times. -- Anna Keesey * LA Review of Books * Mansfield Park highlights, as no other Austen novel does, the role that class and class privilege play in determining the popular qualities for a heroine's charm and wit. -- Tara Isabella Burton * The Paris Review *