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Article: Jane Austen's venture into tragedy. ('Mansfield Park')
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- June 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. 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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Jane Austen's novels are, on the whole, light, amusing and reassuring. They generate little in the way of anxiety or fear. Mansfield Park however is an exception. It differs from the rest in that its mood is more sombre and its content more serious. In the opening chapters we fear for the well-being of the heroine, Fanny Price, and this fear is maintained, perhaps somewhat artificially, in the second half of the book.
There is a straightforward explanation for this unusual degree of fear. At the time Jane Austen started planning Mansfield Park (1811) she had recently read, or re-read, Shakespeare's King Lear, and took a conscious decision to incorporate the themes of ...