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Article: Exploring Mansfield Park: in the footsteps of Fanny Price.
- Article from:
- Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
- Article date:
- January 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Jane Austen Society of North America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IT WAS at the JASNA meeting in Boston in 2000 that I first learned, in the foyer of the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, that there was to be a new, authoritative, scholarly edition of Jane Austen's works to be published by Cambridge University Press. I've known Mansfield Park since my schoolboy days, and, without its being exactly my favorite novel, it's the work of Jane Austen that I've always found most deeply interesting, challenging, and powerful.
And so, for the next five years I found myself working on Mansfield Park. This paper is about the interaction of criticism and scholarship, and how exploring the background (as it's sometimes called) of the novel can ...