Article: A harpist arrives at Mansfield Park: music and the moral ambiguity of Mary Crawford.

ONLY A READER NEW TO Mansfield Park can truly appreciate the delicacy with which Austen suspends the possibility that Mary Crawford might, through loving Edmund Bertram, become as morally sound as Edmund himself. A first-time reader may, indeed, share Edmund's hope that Mary will improve--or, if sympathetic to Fanny Price, suspect and hope that Mary will not. Of Mary's brother Henry, Austen states explicitly early on that he is "thoughtless and selfish from prosperity and bad example" (115), though she does also open the prospect that Fanny might redeem him. Austen makes no such declaration regarding Mary, trusting instead to a series of telling episodes through which ...

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