Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

It has been fiercely argued over for more than 200 years, and with good reason: it is open to radically different interpretations. At its broadest, it is a novel about the condition of England, setting up an opposition, as the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin has put it, between someone with strongly held religious and moral principles who will not consider a marriage that is not based on true feeling, and is revolted by sexual immorality. Many have dismissed the heroine, Fanny Price, as a mere picture of goodness, but John Wiltshire dismisses this argument. The argument that it is a straightforward defence of the conservative way of life is hard to sustain; it is more plausibly seen as questioning the whole patriarchal basis of society, and in particular the extent to which women were trapped by a system over which they had no control.