Mansfield Park | The Jane Austen Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Published 1814 About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen , written at Chawton Cottage between 1812 and 1814. It was published in July 1814 by Thomas Egerton , who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice . When the novel reached a second edition, its publication was taken over by John Murray , who also published its successor, Emma . Contents Edit The main character, Fanny Price , is a young girl from a relatively poor family, raised by her rich uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram , at Mansfield Park .

She grows up with her four cousins, Tom Bertram , Edmund Bertram , Maria Bertram and Julia Bertram Yates , but is always treated as inferior to them; only Edmund shows her real kindness. He is also the most virtuous of the siblings: Maria and Julia are vain and spoiled, while Tom is an irresponsible gambler. Over time, Fanny's gratitude for Edmund's kindness grows into romantic love. When the children have grown up, the stern patriarch Sir Thomas leaves for a year so he can deal with problems on his plantation in Antigua . The fashionable and worldly Henry Crawford and his sister Mary Crawford arrive in the village, and stay with their sister, the Parson's wife . The arrival of the Crawfords disrupts the staid world of Mansfield and sparks a series of romantic entanglements. Mary and Edmund begin to form an attachment, though Edmund often worries that her manners are fashionable and her conversation often cynical, masking a lack of firm principle. However, she is engaging, beautiful and charming, and goes out of her way to befriend Fanny. Fanny fears that Mary has enchanted Edmund, and love has blinded him to her flaws.

Henry plays with the affections of both Maria and Julia, despite Maria being already engaged to the dull, but very rich, Mr. Rushworth . Maria believes that Henry is really in love with her, and treats Mr Rushworth coldly, invoking his jealousy. Fanny is little observed in the family circle - her presence is often overlooked and she frequently witnesses Maria and Henry in compromising situations. Encouraged by Tom and his friend Mr. Yates, the young people decide to put on Elizabeth Inchbald 's play Lovers' Vows ; Edmund and Fanny both initially oppose the plan, believing Sir Thomas would disapprove and feeling that the subject matter of the play is not appropriate. Edmund is eventually swayed, offering to play the part of Anhalt, the lover of the character played by Mary Crawford. As well as giving Mary and Edmund a vehicle to talk about love and marriage, the play provides a pretext for Henry and Maria to flirt in public. Sir Thomas arrives unexpectedly in the middle of a rehearsal, which ends the plan. Henry leaves, and Maria is crushed; realising that Henry does not love her, she marries Mr. Rushworth and they leave for Brighton , taking Julia with them.

Meanwhile, Fanny's improved looks and pleasant temper endear her to Sir Thomas, who pays more attention to her care. Henry returns to Mansfield Park and decides to amuse himself by making Fanny fall in love with him. However, her genuine gentleness and kindness cause him to fall in love with her instead. When he proposes marriage, Fanny's disgust at his improper flirtations with her cousins, as well as her love for Edmund, cause her to reject him. The Bertrams are dismayed, since it is an extremely advantageous match for a poor girl like Fanny. Sir Thomas rebukes her for ingratitude. Henry decides he will continue to pursue Fanny, hoping that in time she will change her mind by coming to believe he is constant. Sir Thomas supports a plan for Fanny to pay a visit to her relatively poor family in Portsmouth , hoping that as Fanny suffers from the lack of comforts there, she will realize the usefulness of a good income. Henry pays Fanny a visit in Portsmouth, to convince her that he has changed and is worthy of her affection. Fanny's attitude begins to soften but she still maintains that she will not marry him.

Henry leaves for London, and shortly afterward, Fanny learns of a scandal involving Henry and Maria. The two had met again and rekindled their flirtation, which quickly had developed into an affair. The affair is discovered and hinted at in a national newspaper; Maria leaves her husband's house and elopes with Henry. The scandal is terrible and the affair results in Maria's divorce; however Henry refuses to marry her. To make matters worse, the dissolute Tom has taken ill, and Julia has eloped with Mr. Yates . Fanny returns to Mansfield Park to comfort her aunt and uncle and to help take care of Tom. Although Edmund knows that marriage to Mary is now impossible because of the scandal between their relations, he goes to see her one last time. During the interview, it becomes clear that Mary does not condemn Henry and Maria's adultery, only that they got caught. Her main concern is covering it up and she implies that if Fanny had accepted Henry, he would have been too busy and happy to have an affair, and would have been content with merely a flirtation. This reveals Mary's true nature to Edmund, who realises he had idealised her as someone she is not.

He tells her so and returns to Mansfield and his living as a Parson at Thornton Lacey. "At exactly the time it should be so, and not a week sooner." Edmund realises how important Fanny is to him, declares his love for her and they are married. Tom recovers from his illness, a steadier and better man for it, and Julia's elopement turns out to be not such a desperate business after all. Austen points out that if only Crawford had persisted in being steadfast to Fanny, and not succumbed to the affair with Maria, Fanny eventually would have accepted his marriage proposal—especially after Edmund had married Mary. Characters Edit Fanny Price - The second eldest of nine children who is sent to live with her mother's sisters at Mansfield Park. Her mother married a poor lieutenant of marines for love. Mrs Price's alcoholic husband was disabled and released from the service on half pay, and she had to settle for a life far less comfortable than those of her sisters. Fanny is sensitive, shy, intelligent, seemingly virtuous, with a good sense of morals; and her status at Mansfield Park as a dependent poor relation only intensifies these traits.

The bulk of the novel takes place when she is eighteen and nineteen. She has been in love with her cousin Edmund since she was young and when both realise their feelings, they get married. Fanny is pursued by Mr. Henry Crawford. Edmund Bertram - The younger son of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram; he is six years older than Fanny. He plans to be a clergyman. He alone among his family has any consideration for Fanny's feelings. As her protector and friend, he has a great deal of influence over her and helps form her character. Edmund becomes attracted to Miss Crawford, but her opinions on the scandal involving Mrs. Rushworth and Mr. Crawford mortify him. He later realizes he is in love with Fanny and they are married. Supporting Characters Mrs. Norris The officious, skinflint sister of Lady Bertram who lives near Mansfield Park. Her husband, Mr. Norris , is the parson at Mansfield Park until his death. She dislikes Fanny and takes every opportunity to put her down and make a distinction between Fanny's treatment and that of her wealthier cousins. Mrs.

Norris also takes every opportunity to save money, such as taking jellies and sewing materials from the main house for her own home. Sir Thomas Bertram The husband of Fanny's aunt, Lady Bertram. He owns the Mansfield Park estate and an estate in Antigua. He is initially stern and correct. He later realises his behaviour may have caused the ruin of his eldest daughter. He wishes his own children were more like his niece and nephew, Fanny and William Price. Thomas Bertram Bertram The older son of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram; he is seven years older than Fanny. Tom is principally interested in carousing in London society and enjoying the pleasures of the theatre with his friend, Mr. Yates. Tom incurs large debts, forcing Sir Thomas to sell the church position that would have gone to Tom's younger brother, Edmund. One celebratory journey leaves Tom with a fever and he later learns the error of his ways. Maria Bertram The very beautiful elder daughter of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram; she is three years older than Fanny. She becomes engaged to Mr. Rushworth but she becomes attached to Henry Crawford. She expects Mr.

Crawford to propose and when he doesn't, she marries Mr. Rushworth for his £12,000 a year, despite knowing him to be a boorish young man with little but his money to recommend him. Mr. Crawford returns to her life soon after her marriage and they elope together. Rushworth divorces her and she is left to the mercy of her family because Mr. Crawford refuses to marry her. She ends up living with her aunt Norris. Julia Bertram Yates The younger daughter of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram; she is two years older than Fanny. She has strong feelings toward Mr. Crawford, but soon learns that he prefers Maria, despite, or because of, her sister's engagement. Mr. Yates pursues her, which is swiftly ended when Sir Thomas returns to the house. Julia later goes with Mr. and Mrs. Rushworth on their honeymoon and to their house in town. About the same time Maria runs away with Mr Crawford, Julia elopes with Mr. Yates, ostensibly to avoid being blamed by her father for Maria's elopement with Mr. Crawford. Mr. Henry Crawford Brother of Mrs.

Grant and Miss Crawford. A charming, extremely intelligent and eligible bachelor who plays with the emotions of Maria and Julia. This is observed by Fanny. After Maria's marriage, he decides to make Fanny fall in love with him but instead falls in love with her. He loses any chance with her after he and Maria elope together. Miss Mary Crawford The pretty and charming sister of Mr. Crawford and Mrs Grant, who takes a keen interest in Edmund Bertram in spite of his being a second son. However, though she seems charming, she has certain views and opinions which mean, in the end, she loses Edmund. She is often kind to Fanny Price, but is not a reliable friend since she is aware of her brother Henry's plan to toy with Fanny's heart, but does nothing to discourage him. Jane Austen’s “dead silence,” or, How Guilty is Sir Thomas Bertram? | Sarah Emsley Jane Austen’s “dead silence,” or, How Guilty is Sir Thomas Bertram?

≈ 37 Comments Tags books , Deborah Barnum , Fanny Price , Fiction , Jane Austen , literature , Lord Mansfield , Mansfield Park , Mansfield Park 200th anniversary , Sir Thomas Bertram , slave trade , slavery Seventeenth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park . This is Deborah Barnum’s second post for “An Invitation to Mansfield Park.” In the first, back in May, she surveyed the publishing history of the novel: “‘I have something in hand…’ – The Publishing of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park .” Deborah is a former law librarian, now owner of Bygone Books, a closed shop of fine and collectible books in Burlington, Vermont. She is currently the regional coordinator for the JASNA Vermont Region, author of the Jane Austen in Vermont blog, and compiler of the annual “Jane Austen Bibliography” for the JASNA journal Persuasions On-Line .

Mansfield Park cover (2012) She says she’s “a firm believer that Mansfield Park is Austen’s greatest work, that Austen felt that way herself, and that because the comedy is overshadowed by the weight of tragedy, it is too often on the bottom of everyone’s favorites list.” And she adds that she’s happy to see my efforts to correct this! I’m grateful to her for lending her support to the cause, too. I trust you all like and appreciate Mansfield Park more than you did, say, this time last year, when we were all wrapped up in celebrating Pride and Prejudice and hardly had time to spare a thought for Fanny Price. I know my own appreciation for the complexities of the novel has been increasing over these last few months, as I’ve been learning so much from all of you. Thank you all for participating in this celebration by reading, writing guest posts, and commenting, and thank you, Deborah, for taking on the daunting task of analyzing the “dead silence” that follows Fanny’s question about the slave trade.

Please visit Deborah’s blog Jane Austen in Vermont, where she has compiled all the passages from Mansfield Park that relate to the slave trade or the West Indies/Antigua . She has also posted a bibliography for further reading on the topic of Mansfield Park and slavery, in which you can find more details about all the sources mentioned in this post. [Edmund to Fanny] “Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. – You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.” [Fanny] “But I do talk to him more that I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?” “I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.” “And I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence!

And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like – I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.” – From Mansfield Park, Chapter 21 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) Why I chose this passage, I have no idea! In these two words, “dead silence,” lies the crux of Mansfield Park – they are more analyzed as to the author’s intent than perhaps any other passage in all of Jane Austen. To understand this passage we need a thorough study of the slave trade and the history of the abolition movement in England; knowledge of the conditions of life for the owners and slaves in the West Indies, Antigua in particular; an in-depth view of Jane Austen’s personal connections to this slave-owning culture; some analysis of Austen’s political beliefs with thoughts that her allusions to the slave trade equal the condition of women in the early 19th century; and the generations of controversial critical analysis of this short passage. A heady task for a blog post!

So, I leave others to discuss these complex histories as I focus just on the “dead silence” passage and what Austen might be telling us about Sir Thomas and his connections to the slave trade, knowing full well it is a danger to take Jane Austen out of context – all is connected, each word essential to the whole, a tale told straight-forward but always with clues and nods to deeper meanings. I am doing Austen a disservice here, especially with this overcharged sentence, but I provide you here with a few questions to ponder the wider context of the novel and a bibliography for further reading. Lord Mansfield, by Jean Baptiste van Loo, National Portrait Gallery (Source: Wikipedia) Is Mansfield Park named after Lord Mansfield?

(You have perhaps all seen Belle , or read Paula Byrne’s book about the true story behind the movie?) William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705-1793), and the Lord Chief Justice from 1756-1788, raised his two great nieces (see portrait below) Elizabeth Murray (whom Austen met a number of times, as noted in her letters) and Dido Belle, the daughter of Mansfield’s nephew John Lindsay and a slave named Maria Belle. In 1772, Mansfield ruled in the James Somerset case (also spelled Somersett) that no former slave could be removed from Britain and sold back into slavery. This and his ruling in the Zong case (the case portrayed in the movie) that human beings were not “property” were viewed as the beginning of the end of slavery on British soil.

Austen surely knew of Mansfield’s rulings, as we know from her letters that she read Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808) (see Letter 24, January 1813), and very likely chose this name for the house in Mansfield Park to make a clear statement of her slavery sentiments. (However, it is useful to look to John Wiltshire in his “Decolonizing Mansfield Park” where he gives us these two other options for the title: there is a Lady Mansfield who stays in Mansfield House in Austen’s favorite novel, Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753); and a book titled Amelie Mansfield, a French novel by Sophie Cottin, was first published in 1802.) Elizabeth Murray and Dido Belle (Source: NPR) Is Austen equating the slave trade to the condition of women in English society?

Jane Austen must have known of Hannah More’s 1805 pamphlet The White Slave Trade: Hints toward Framing a Bill for the Abolition of the White Female Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster, about young women “coming out” into society. The introduction of the “slave trade” into the text of Emma (see quotes on my blog ) is even more telling here, equating the life of a slave with that of a governess, each really no more than property and badly treated. Can the reader apply the metaphor of Mansfield Park = the State of the Nation, as many domestic novels of the time did? Fanny as slave, Sir Thomas as landlord/plantation owner, Mrs. Norris as his cruel agent – all fails when the Master is absent. Was Austen a colonialist, an abolitionist, or both? Edward Said’s interpretation of Mansfield Park (see bibliography ) is the starting point for all discussion of this topic: he posits that Jane Austen was a product of her time, and the true daughter of an England that colonized and brutalized, and that she made only this off-hand nod to the slave trade to underscore her own lack of interest in it.

That is, by returning her characters at tale’s end to the “tolerable comfort” of a restored Mansfield Park, Austen seems to condone the way of life it represents. We can read what she read, know what the sentiments were to slavery among her family and close connections, but we can only conjecture what she was intending in Mansfield Park. Is this novel a book about slavery? Or is this passage nothing more than a brief reference to the realities of life in England at the time Austen was writing? Broadside: Description of a Slave Ship (from Clarkson’s book) The Scene of the “dead silence” Edmund and Fanny are discussing the change in the atmosphere at Mansfield Park since Sir Thomas’ return: all is “sameness and gloom,” and Edmund is lamenting the loss of the Parsonage company and their liveliness. Fanny (who we know to be happier without the Crawfords!), responds by saying “the evenings do not appear long to me. I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together.

It entertains me more than many other things have done….” (Recall Fanny’s feelings of “dreadful duty” when first appearing before her uncle on his return.) Edmund continues in response with the rather creepy chat about Fanny’s personal charms – her face, her figure – relating what his father has said of Fanny to him, and then we arrive at the “slave trade” comment (which is a tad ironic after the description of Fanny as a commodity – something to look at, appraise, and perhaps buy and sell?). Then we have Fanny’s “dead silence” (such a strong phrase isn’t it?), followed by Edmund’s “it would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of further.” Fanny explains her reluctance to question further because she was afraid of slighting her cousins in their indifference to their father: “ – I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.” And then I find this very telling: Edmund goes on to talk of Mary Crawford, as uninterested in the slave trade as they all were the night before. (I am always rather appalled at Edmund.

He might offer Fanny her only kindnesses, but he often forgets her quite easily, just as Tom Bertram does. Early on he finds her an “interesting object” [my emphasis]; he gives her horse to Mary without a thought; he never seems to stand up for her when she is constantly badgered by Mrs. Norris; he wishes her to marry Henry as much for himself to have a closer connection to Mary; and why, oh why, does he never insist on a fire in her room?? – but alas! This is a topic for another post….) Who is Sir Thomas? Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas (Patricia Rozema’s MP film, 1999) The lack of response, the “dead silence,” to Fanny’s question has sent critics off into such contradictory analysis, one wonders if we have all read the same book. Jane Austen gives us very little to go on. We are told only that Mansfield is a “modern built house,” that Sir Thomas is a member of Parliament (but we don’t know if he is part of the established landed gentry or newly wealthy – he is awfully eager to marry off Maria to Mr.

Rushworth with his money and connections), and that he has an estate in Antigua. We don’t know how long he has owned the estate, or whether indeed it is a sugar plantation dependent upon the slave economy (most critics assume that it is), or how dependent Mansfield Park is on the income from this estate (Mrs. Norris: “Sir Thomas’s means will be rather straitened, if the Antigua estate is to make such poor returns”). We don’t know exactly the dating of the action, which would help us understand the historical context of the tale. All we do know is that Sir Thomas needs to go to Antigua to deal with issues that are causing “such poor returns.” He expects to be gone a year. Has he gone before, we might wonder? We only hear of his being gone to Town. He is, in the event, gone for two years, this fact often missed in the reading – he returns a changed man, physically and emotionally, and seems to enjoy talking about his time there (recall his comments later in the novel on the “balls of Antigua”). There was a life there among the colonial gentry and Fanny, unlike the rest of the family, enjoys hearing him talk of it.

So how do we look at Sir Thomas? He is the Master of Mansfield Park; he reigns over all, not unlike the Master on a slave-hold. The major issue of the West Indies plantations was the absentee landlord. The agent or overseer was often the abuser of the slaves and the money-matters and this was where many troubles began: sickness and loss of workers, slave rebellions, etc. Recall here Sir Thomas’s own words on the clergyman needing to live among his parishioners: “… if he does not live among his parishioners and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little for their good or his own.” Sir Thomas goes to Antigua to solve whatever problems are going on, and in so doing ironically leaves his English home in the hands of a cruel overseer, Mrs. Norris.

Why she is so named is another of the Mansfield Park speculations: is she named for the anti-abolitionist slave trader John Norris of Liverpool (referred to by Clarkson), or as Wiltshire points out, is this name a satirical turn on “nourrice” / “norrice,” the French / English word for “to nourish” – certainly not our Mrs. Norris! Why Antigua? Map of Antigua (source: Gregson Davis article ) Having Sir Thomas absent from Mansfield for two years is of course a plot device. Austen could have used other storylines to send him away, but she does not – she sends him to Antigua. In Sir Thomas’s absence, all manner of ills beset Mansfield Park: the ridiculous Rushworth; the interloping Crawfords who disturb the peace of the “goodly heritage” (though we all are really glad they showed up!); the sexual undercurrents of the theatricals; Mrs.

Norris’s cruel (though often funny) antics; Edmund’s obsession with Mary; Tom’s freedom from his father and his duties as elder son; and Henry’s harassing manipulation of Fanny – and the absentee Landlord/Master returns to find all in disarray. Readings about the slave trade and slavery debates of the time make clear that Antigua was very different from the other slave-dependent colonies. William Wilberforce noted that slaves in Antigua were better treated and were given Christian instruction, which led to “happier” slaves. And not all plantation owners were part of the slave-holding lobby in Parliament. Many, as Christian sons of England, were opposed to the slave trade, believing that its abolition would lead to better treatment of the existing slaves, and that gradually slavery itself would “fade away” (see Boulukos). Surely the close reader cannot really pass on all these references to Mansfield, Antigua, Norris, Austen’s favorite poet Cowper (a devout abolitionist), and the plot line of Fanny as slave, Sir Thomas as Master, as just coincidence – we know that Austen has no throw-away lines and these are not-so-subtle hints.

It may not be clear that Sir Thomas as an MP is for or against the slave trade and slavery, but all these clues seem to indicate that Jane Austen was opposed to slavery and her Mansfield Park stands as her way of addressing the debate. Is Sir Thomas a bad father? Jane Austen did not do kindly by her living mothers, but her fathers are a sad and mostly awful lot as well. There are times I feel that Sir Thomas is the twin brother of General Tilney – certainly they are very close in their dictatorial parenting, unkind to their daughters who are treated as property. At other times he is like Sir Walter Elliot, overly concerned with his economic bottom-line and first impressions; he likes to retire to his own space much like Mr. Bennet (and lord knows what he really thinks of Lady Bertram! – it is clear that he does not like to play cards with her!); and though he is thankfully not a hypochondriac, he is often as self-absorbed as Mr. Woodhouse. But unlike the other fathers, Sir Thomas is a more complicated figure. We don’t know enough about the conditions in and reasons for going to Antigua to really know what he is about.

Readers often want to put him squarely in the available historical context of abolitionist-frenzied Britain to get a true sense of him. (Note that the slave trade was abolished in 1807-08 and a law for strict enforcement was passed in 1811, but slave labor in Britain was not abolished until 1833). The time-frame of the novel is important here: Chapman dates the main action as 1805-1809, during the height of the slave trade debate; Brian Southam dates it as 1810-1813, after the passage of the laws, at a time when the country was dealing with the effect of the new laws. We may too easily look on Sir Thomas as a generous man to his wife’s poor relations: he takes in Fanny and helps William. But Austen is clear in describing him as doing it all for selfish reasons – all to feel good about himself. And lest we forget, Fanny is basically an unpaid servant. Guilt by “silence”? If we return to the passage, we find Fanny in her usual self-deprecating mode.

By not pursuing the “slave trade” question, she is afraid of “[setting] myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.” (Fanny has certainly progressed from the ten-year-old Maria and Julia made fun of for her geographical failings!) And so ends the discussion. But why doesn’t Sir Thomas respond?? Edmund thinks he would welcome more questions, Fanny is “silenced” (her usual state), and we are left with a “Sir Thomas, guilty or not?” and the crux of the conversation about whether Mansfield Park is a book about slavery. Are we made to see, as surely as Sir Thomas does, that it is the “second-class” Fanny who has the gumption to ask the question not perhaps brought up in polite company, where all are rendered silent, much as the wider world chooses not to talk about it? But I wonder this: Does Sir Thomas respond to Fanny? And Austen, as in her proposal scenes, leaves us out of the hearing?

Looking at Austen’s words very closely: first we don’t actually know what Fanny asks about the slave trade – is she asking about its effect on the plantation, or about the slaves themselves, or is she asking about Sir Thomas’ stand on it all, or what the future might bring? Then we have Edmund’s response: “I was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther” (my emphasis). Fanny replies about the dead silence of her cousins and her wish not to outshine them “by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his daughters to feel” (my emphasis). This seems to imply that Sir Thomas does respond to Fanny’s question, but then the dead silence of the rest of the company follows and Fanny chooses not to “inquire farther.” But Austen doesn’t allow us to hear what Sir Thomas says, and we are still left to speculate on his involvement in and views on the slave trade and slavery – and I think this is Austen’s point: she raises the question, but how does one answer it while living off the fruits of a slave-owning system?

“guilt and misery” Fanny and Edmund, illustration by C. E. Brock (Source: Mollands) Sir Thomas, of course, is severely “punished” by Austen at the tale’s end. Mansfield Park still stands, the income for now secure, or so it seems, but he is a less dominant force, made aware of his failings through a passage into self-knowledge: he loses Maria and Mrs. Norris to their sad destiny (and thankfully Susan arrives to take on Lady Bertram duty); Julia is lost to Mr. Yates; Tom the profligate heir might be improved and at last helpful, but will he give Mansfield the heir it needs to continue as it has?; and Edmund wins Fanny, now Sir Thomas’s true daughter (but not the mistress of Mansfield as many writers proclaim). Austen, always the wit, prefaces her doling out the Fates with: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” And the Great Summing Up begins – reminding us that this is a Fiction, a comedy of sorts, its characters are of her Imagination, and she can end it how she chooses. We don’t know what happens after page 473, and perhaps Austen didn’t know either. But it was clear to her that the world of the landed gentry with its obsession with elder sons and inheritance, and the economic funding of a land dependent upon slave labor to sustain itself, was entering a time of great change. We can look at Mansfield Park as a Cinderella story, complete with the wicked stepmothers and stepsisters and a variety of Regency shenanigans thrown in, and marvel how it all works out in the end with the proper (if dull) Prince (but alas! not the eldest son as Mary so lamented).

Or we can look at it as an allegory of a system of patriarchy that controlled the lives and limbs of all the “inferior” beings (that is, slaves, wives, daughters, errant sons, servants) they depended upon to sustain their way of life. I am confused by Sir Thomas, am at turns horrified by him, and then sympathetic towards him – he is a contradiction, surely a product of his time and all too human, and I see here Austen with her broad strokes, posing the questions, challenging us in our turn to not be silent, to not be guilty of inattention…. I have not mentioned Patricia Rozema’s 1999 Mansfield Park film – I love this movie, I love seeing Fanny’s strengths made visible, finding Fanny as Jane Austen, Writer. But the slavery subtext that is made so very visually explicit in this movie, strongly so and not easy to forget, is, I remind you, not in the book…. What are your thoughts on Sir Thomas and the “dead silence” response to Fanny about the “slave trade”?

Please visit Jane Austen in Vermont for more information related to this post: Mansfield Park text references to the slave trade, Antigua and the West Indies, and slavery . Bibliography of further reading on the topic of Mansfield Park and slavery. To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park . Coming soon: guest posts by Laurel Ann Nattress, Lorrie Clark, Elaine Bander, and Maggie Arnold. Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the Mansfield Park party! Please share. Thank you! SparkNotes: Mansfield Park: Characters Mansfield Park Summary Chapters 1-3 Fanny Price - The protagonist. The daughter of a drunken sailor and a woman who married beneath her, she comes to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. They take her in as an act of charity to her parents. She is mistreated and always reminded of her "place" as a charity ward, but she eventually comes to be an indispensable member of the family.

Modest, always proper, and, as she grows older, quite beautiful, Fanny is secretly in love with the Bertrams' son Edmund but is the subject of proposals by the slick Henry Crawford. Sir Thomas Bertram - A wealthy landowner and Fanny's uncle. He is authoritarian and rather hard on his children until a series of disasters show him the error of his ways. He owns slaves on his plantations in the Caribbean, a fact that hangs over the book. He means well and eventually does right by Fanny. Lady Bertram - Fanny's aunt; her mother's sister and Sir Thomas's wife. She is neurotic, a hypochondriac, and lazy. A beauty in her youth, she values people's attractiveness over all else, yet she is honest enough to admit how much Fanny means to her. Edmund Bertram - The Bertrams' younger son. Since he will not be the heir to Mansfield, he will become a clergyman. The only one of the Bertrams' children with a good head and a good heart, Edmund is Fanny's closest companion. He rather blindly falls in love with Mary Crawford, which almost leads to his downfall.

Maria Bertram - The Bertrams' older daughter. Vain and pretentious, she abuses Fanny and marries the odious Rushworth for his fortune. Her self-indulgence eventually gets her in quite a lot of trouble. Her name would have been pronounced "Mariah" (as in Mariah Carey). Julia Bertram - The Bertrams' younger daughter. She is equally vain but slightly less cocky, since she is younger and less beautiful than Maria. She follows Maria around, and, upon Maria's elopement, she runs away with Yates, her brother Tom's friend. Tom Bertram - The Bertrams' older son and the heir to Mansfield. He lives to party and has gotten into debt, for which Edmund will suffer. Eventually, his lifestyle catches up to him, as he nearly dies from an illness caused by too much drinking. Mrs. Norris - Sister to Fanny's mother and Lady Bertram; wife of the first parson at Mansfield Parsonage. She has no children of her own and is an officious busybody, always trying to derive glory from her association with the family.

She is horribly cruel to Fanny, whom she is always reminding of her "place" in the family. Mary Crawford - Sister of Mrs. Grant, who is the wife of the second parson at Mansfield. She is beautiful and charming, but also shallow and evil. She has been brought up poorly by an aunt and uncle and has been subject to the influences of her fashionable friends. She becomes friends with a reluctant Fanny, while Edmund falls in love with and nearly proposes to her. Henry Crawford - Mary's brother. He is equally charming and possibly even more amoral, and he possesses a sizeable estate. First Maria and Julia fall in love with him, and he takes to Maria, despite her engagement. When Maria marries and the sisters leave Mansfield, he falls for Fanny and proposes to her. Everyone is convinced he is a changed man. Eventually, he meets up with Maria again, and the two run off, but their relationship ends badly. William Price - Fanny's brother. Sir Thomas has gotten him a commission in the Navy, and Henry gets him a promotion as part of his effort to seduce Fanny. William and Fanny are extremely close, and he impresses everyone as a bright, capable young man.

He represents a sort of ideal companion for Fanny, although, as her brother, of course, he is not an eligible mate for her. Rushworth - Maria's fiance and then husband. He is an idiot and a bore, but quite wealthy. It is his estate that the group visits early in the novel. He provides some comic relief with his stupid comments. Susan Price - Fanny's younger sister, with whom she gets reacquainted when she returns to her family's home. Susan is a diamond in the rough, a smart girl with essentially good manners who is stuck in a terrible home. Fanny brings her back to Mansfield Park with her, where she becomes a new favorite of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. Yates - Tom Bertram's friend, who proposes the amateur theatricals at Mansfield. He shows an interest in Julia, which continues in London. After Maria runs off with Henry, Julia and Yates elope and marry; they, however, are rehabilitated within the family.

More Help JASNA Essay Contest Montréal, Canada Repaying Her Debt: Mansfield Park’s Economies of Power Written in early nineteenth-century England’s increasingly commercial society, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park portrays overlapping systems of social and economic exchange. The majority of the novel’s characters, notably Sir Thomas Bertram, Mrs. Norris, and Mary Crawford, circulate within economies or value systems based on wealth and sexual (or marriageable) exchange; however, their attempts to manipulate other characters within these economies endanger the Mansfield estate. Only Austen’s protagonist, Fanny Price, resists these limited economies of wealth and marriage, despite the social and fiscal “debt” she owes to her Bertram relations for her upbringing. Fanny does not completely deny the value systems in which she is situated, but responds to them with an economy of her own. She is not immune to other characters’ prevailing attitudes that “money and feelings are interchangeable currencies, that presents of cash or things represent love and ought to be reciprocated with gratitude” (Deresiewicz 68); however, she reciprocates with redefined feelings of gratitude based on an economy of emotional and moral exchange.

Through Fanny’s physical embodiment of this economy of gratitude, Austen rewrites the dominant systems of power—based on wealth and sexual exchange—not only to redeem or condemn the novel’s characters, but to recover the damaged estate itself. Because Fanny’s agency and resistance are realized within, rather than in opposition to, the social and physical constraints of Mansfield Park, and specifically within the East room, her system of moral value becomes indivisible from the physical surroundings in which it is developed. The “debt” that Fanny incurs from the Bertrams is from the beginning expressed by Sir Thomas and Mrs. Norris in terms of social status, wealth, and remuneration: these preoccupations, however, go beyond personal, individual concerns to implicate the social and economic insecurity of the Mansfield estate. In their initial discussion about providing for Fanny, Sir Thomas and Mrs. Norris blend monetary considerations with those of social distinction: “‘Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without farther expense to anybody’” (Austen 7).

It is within the financial and social parameters of her debt that Fanny “owes” for her maintenance that she is first instructed to feel gratitude: “Mrs. Norris had been talking to her the whole way from Northampton of her wonderful good fortune, and the extraordinary degree of gratitude and good behaviour which it ought to produce” (12). Fanny must feel gratitude and happiness, and will in fact train herself to do so, but not under Mrs. Norris’s terms. Indeed, Mrs. Norris’s definition of “good fortune” as implying wealth and status only makes the young Fanny uneasy within the physical space of Mansfield: “The rooms were too large for her to move in with ease; whatever she touched she expected to injure, and she crept about in constant terror of something or other; often retreating towards her own chamber to cry” (13). Whereas Mrs. Norris never ceases to hold Fanny’s “gratitude” to account in pecuniary terms, such as denying her a fire in the East room (106), it is in and through this chamber that Fanny will finally enact her gratitude.

Austen directly connects the monetary “debt” that Fanny owes the Bertrams with the income and maintenance of the estate: the Antiguan sugar plantations that necessitate Sir Thomas’s extended voyage not only further the plot and enable the famous theatricals, but also signal the precarious social and economic position of an estate that relies solely on external income rather than rents from its land. The family circle, including Fanny, materially depends on this “sphere of labour and of commodity exchange” (Habermas 46): as Sir Thomas’s “circumstances were rendered less fair than heretofore, by some recent losses on his West India Estate, in addition to his eldest son’s extravagance, it became not undesirable to himself to be relieved by the expense of [Fanny’s] support, and the obligation of her future provision” (Austen 19). When Sir Thomas directly departs to the plantation, and into this sphere of exchange, his absence allows his children to do as they please, proving that the family’s social structure, as well as its economic basis, depends on such “external” spheres.

Sir Thomas’s voyage also implies a social truth: in Austen’s society to “own land was to be identified more physically with the nation than to engage in commerce and a wide yet intimate knowledge of the affairs of the countryside where the majority of the nation lived made landowners the ‘natural’ governing class” (Jones 269). If Sir Thomas’s journey reveals Mansfield’s economic and social separation from extensive, profitable land—the English estate’s traditional productive role—then it also signals to readers an uneasiness in the social status of the estate, an ambiguity suggesting “new and uncertain rank, if not new wealth, and an unease in Sir Thomas’s social position” (Sutherland xxvii), even aside from his role as a slave-owner. Though the Bertrams are among the wealthiest families at the centre of Austen’s novels, “we do not know whether [Sir Thomas] is the first baronet or one in a long line” (Sutherland xxvi) nor how long he has been in possession of the “modern-built” (Austen 49) Mansfield property.

The “necessity” (33) of Sir Thomas’s “dangerous wartime journey” signifies that Mansfield may already be an “impersonation” of an estate, “inward-looking and defensive, still finding its public position” (Sutherland xxvii) within the bases of a monetary economy that, for Austen’s society, is dangerously detached from English land. Therefore perhaps Sir Thomas also looks to another value system to stabilize his family within the landed ranks: to circulate Fanny and his children within the economy of marriage and sexual exchange. The first paragraph of Mansfield Park introduces a society accustomed to the combined transactions of wealth and marriage, circles of power in which Fanny is expected to repay the debt of her upbringing; for most women in the novel, marriage is the only economy that matters, but for Mary Crawford and Maria Bertram especially, their confidence that they can successfully manipulate this system proves disastrous.

Though the novel’s action occurs almost completely within the “the enclosed space of the patriarchal conjugal family” (Habermas 46)—Austen presents “Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park” (5) in the first sentence, and ends the novel within “the view and patronage of Mansfield Park” (321)—from the start the narrator instantly submerges any intimacy of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram’s marriage within economic discourse and the multiple voices of public opinion: “All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it” (5). Wealth and sexual economics immediately collide, and people’s worth is judged in terms of monetary value. For Austen’s gentlewomen, marriage is often indeed their only economy, and Mary Crawford circulates entirely within these expected transactions of power. She seeks to define Fanny in terms of the marriage economy: “‘I begin now to understand you all, except Miss Price … Pray, is she out, or is she not?’” (36).

Mary’s understanding of Fanny rests solely on this distinction, indicating that she cannot conceive of an individual outside of the sexual exchange. Power, for Mary, is integral to her participation in the marriage economy, which she articulates in financial terms: “‘Fanny, the glory of fixing one who has been shot at by so many; of having it in one’s power to pay off the debts of one’s sex!’” (246). For Maria Bertram, the power of the marriage exchange is entirely monetary: Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s, as well as ensure her the house in town, which was now a prime object, it became, by the same rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could. (29) However, by perceiving this system of sexual economy as the basis of what Austen ironically names her “rule of moral obligation,” Maria will embark on affair with Henry Crawford that will ostracize her from the final economic system of gratitude and moral value that will, via Fanny, come to dominate the novel and the estate.

Before the enactment of this new system of power, Sir Thomas attempts to manipulate Fanny via the economy of sexual exchange; by appealing to the importance of gratitude, Sir Thomas gestures toward but does not yet understand Fanny’s eventual means of “repaying” her debt. Sir Thomas conceives of Henry Crawford’s courtship of Fanny in economic terms, not only practically, but also syntactically: he voices Henry’s offer of marriage, and Fanny’s subsequent refusal, as “transactions” (217). Upon Fanny’s refusal, Sir Thomas’s accusation of ingratitude echoes Mrs. Norris’s earlier insistence on proper gratitude, and thus affects Fanny stronger that his other admonitions: “‘You do not owe me the duty of a child. But, Fanny, if your heart can acquit you of ingratitude—’” (216). The hyperbolic expression of Fanny’s play of thought reveals that she is intensely aware how “gratitude” is “one of the most important civil exchange tokens” (Handler and Segal 72): “ungrateful! to have appeared so to him! She was miserable forever” (Austen 329).

Sir Thomas also tries to appeal to Fanny’s gratitude toward Henry Crawford for his attentions. Gratitude indeed plays a strong role in courtship in the novel, but of a different kind. In the “courtship”—if it can be so called—of Edmund and Fanny, gratitude forms an initiating as well as reoccurring part: only after Fanny exhibits “gratitude and delight,” does Edmund “begin to find her an interesting object” (17). On Fanny’s part, “[s]he regarded her cousin … as entitled to such gratitude from her, as no feelings could be strong enough to pay” (28). Handler and Segal argue that “gratitude can only be a response; it is at once an acknowledgment of attentions received and a preliminary return that holds the promise of increasing returns in the future” (72); it is via the social responsibility and moral value systems as expressed through proper gratitude that Fanny will finally make those “returns.” In rejecting Henry Crawford, and therefore the other characters’ dominant systems of value and exchange, Fanny posits a different way of being in the world, a system based on moral worth.

Her rejection of Crawford due to her objections to his “principles” belongs to a system of value that is at this point in the narrative incommunicable to Sir Thomas (Austen 215). Fanny’s beloved East room, her private space, physically manifests the development of this responsible social exchange that will eventually dominate the other systems of power in the novel. For Fanny, every object in the East room is “a friend, or [bears] her thoughts to a friend” (106). This interior receptiveness to others, nurtured by attachment to place, yields in Fanny the memory-based anxiety of how to repay “the amount of the debt which all these kind remembrances produced” (107). Therefore when Sir Thomas admonishes Fanny in the east room when she refuses Crawford, his accusation of “ingratitude” (216) carries enormous weight in a setting that has already suggested to Fanny the “amount of the debt” (107) she owes him.

The objects in the east room, almost all cast-offs or gifts, imply that Fanny has no personal material wealth: “the claims of her cousins to being obliged, were strengthened by the sight of present upon present that she had received from them” (107)—but her “return cannot be made in the same currency” (Handler and Segal 72). By valuing these objects through their association with the givers, Fanny demonstrates the emotional worth with which she repays her material debt: “emotional economics provides its real payoff for her creditors” (Deresiewicz 68). In constructing Fanny’s feelings of gratitude as “a kind of currency that she must use to repay her debt to the Bertrams” (68), embodied through the space of the East room, Austen furthermore presents this physical space as a location of powerful agency: just as Fanny develops within and not against the confines of the room, she subverts the economic systems in which she is placed by defining herself within them. Fanny acquires agency by claiming ownership of her structural boundaries.

Such natural and reflective “fortification” allows Fanny to become “mistress” (Austen 105) of her active selfhood as well as of her domestic space. Initially, she can only utter a “gentle ‘come in’” (107) to Edmund when he enters her room, and then cannot offer her opinion: “‘My opinion!’ she cried, shrinking from such a compliment” (107). When Mary Crawford visits, Fanny “endeavour[s] to show herself mistress of the room,” but can only look “with concern” at her enforced privations, “the bright bars of her empty grate” (117). We may read these “bright bars” symbolically: unlike Maria, whose “mistake is to wish for extended bounds, to challenge enclosure” (Sutherland xxxvii), Fanny achieves agency by adapting herself to her domestic constraints.

Eventually Fanny can “naturally” take “her guest” (Austen 242), Mary Crawford, to her room; she has no more anxieties about belonging to the space, and in this scene gives her opinion: “‘I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman’s feelings’” (246). By using the contained space of Mansfield both to develop her burgeoning agency and her own economy of reciprocity, based on moral worth and gratitude, Fanny gains the power to redeem an estate that by the end of the novel is damaged by excessive reliance on monetary and sexual systems of value, systems that enable Maria and Henry Crawford’s affair. Fanny’s realized personal agency extends beyond the private self into relationships of responsible social exchange (Handler and Segal 59) rooted in principles of debt and gratitude that in turn make her a fitting moral centre for the precarious Mansfield estate.

Though she remains within the original economic systems of Mansfield, Fanny resists the manipulations of other characters within those economies, namely Sir Thomas and Mary Crawford, and in doing so constructs her own agency and economy of social exchange within, and not in opposition to, the estate—which in turn allows her to imbue Mansfield with a new system of value that proves more stable for the household than an unmitigated circulation of wealth and sexual exchange. In allowing her protagonist to build this morality-based economy, Austen creates a fiction of resistance against the increasingly commercial society of early nineteenth-century England. At the end of the narrative, when Fanny returns from her visit to Portsmouth, the novel no longer enters her cherished East room. The other characters recognize her value, and her influence now surpasses the space in which she has nurtured and contained her reflective interiority. The text acknowledges that through this separate, proper function of gratitude, Fanny redeems her debt: Sir Thomas’s “liberality had a rich repayment” (Austen 486). Works Cited: Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. ed. Claudia L. Johnson. W. W.

Norton: New York, 1998. Deresiewicz, William. Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Print. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 1962. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. 1989. Cambridge: Polity P, 2008. Print. Handler, Richard, and David Segal. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1990. Print. Jones, Chris. “Landownership.” Jane Austen in Context. ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 269-77. Print. Sutherland, Kathryn. Introduction. Mansfield Park. By Jane Austen. 1814. London: Penguin Books, 2003. xi-xl. Print.

FILM REVIEW; Spicing Austen's 1806 With Dashes of 1999 - The New York Times The New York Times Movies |FILM REVIEW; Spicing Austen's 1806 With Dashes of 1999 Search Continue reading the main story ''My God, this is 1806, for heaven's sake!'' a character exclaims in ''Mansfield Park,'' Patricia Rozema's smart, politically pointed screen adaptation of Jane Austen's third novel. This reminder of how every age foolishly fancies itself the most progressive and enlightened in the history of the world is drenched in irony. And it speaks to the heart of a film that is determined to invest Austen with as many prickly contemporary resonances as it can shoehorn in without appearing wildly anachronistic. ''Mansfield Park'' takes special pains to remind us that the glory of the British empire and the comfortable life of the novel's landed gentry were the products of colonial exploitation.

Where the novel alludes to the slave trading business of Sir Thomas Bertram (Harold Pinter), the pompous authoritarian who owns the estate called Mansfield Park, the movie rubs our faces in his dirty business. The novel's rather meek central character, Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor), has been retooled and pumped up for the film into a spunky Jane Austen stand-in who recites directly to the camera fragments from Austen's letters and diaries. The movie's Fanny is an ambitious, willful writer from a poor background whose unstoppable intellectual drive is synonymous with her integrity. Her categorical rejection of Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola), a wealthy aristocratic dreamboat whom Sir Thomas insists she marry, marks her as a proto-feminist heroine who risks losing everything by standing up to male authority. Other modern touches include blatant drug addiction and hints of lesbianism. Sir Thomas's wife, Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan), is a bleary-eyed, nodding-out junkie in the thrall of the opiate laudanum.

Fanny's friendship with Henry's sophisticated, scheming sister, Mary (Embeth Davidtz), who looks so much like Fanny she could almost be her twin, has a strong lesbian undercurrent, and in one scene the two women narrowly avoid falling into a passionate kiss. In another scene (not in the novel), Fanny discovers Henry in bed with someone else's wife. Fanny, although suitably appalled, appears to know enough about the birds and the bees not to require smelling salts after barging in on the pair in full sexual gallop. Continue reading the main story In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, this extensive tinkering and modernizing might seem irritating and pretentious. But in peering beneath Austen's genteel surfaces and scraping away the Hollywood gloss that traditionally accrues to screen adaptations of Austen, Ms. Rozema has made a film whose satiric bite is sharper than that of the usual high-toned romantic costume drama. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Accentuating the aspects of ''Mansfield Park'' that lend it the aura of a feminist fable about women, power and money, Ms.

Rozema turns it into the story of a clever, willful woman who grits her teeth and, in a reckless gamble, evades the dictates of an oppressive patriarchal society. One of the chief obstacles to Fanny's self-fulfillment is her poverty. Sent by her poor family in Portsmouth to live with wealthy relatives in Mansfield Park, she is treated like a servant and told that her lack of means has made her an unlikely candidate for a good marriage. The autocratic Sir Thomas, who rules the palace, ignores Fanny until she matures into a pretty young thing, at which point he can barely keep his hands off her. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy One element of the story Ms. Rozema hasn't updated is Fanny's abiding love for Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller), Sir Thomas's goody-goody bookworm of a younger son, who forgoes the family business to become a clergyman.

In keeping with 19th-century romantic convention, it isn't until the very end that Edmund comes to his senses and realizes that Fanny (and not Mary, who in one startling scene reveals herself to be a kind of period Joan Collins character) is the love of his life. The film's portrayal of early-19th-century affluence is notably more austere than in other film adaptations of Austen, which surround the characters in ruffles and flourishes. Mansfield Park is an imposing but sparsely accommodated palace whose overall grimness mirrors the constricting puritanical morality of English society and Fanny's prisonlike confinement within social convention. Casting Ms. Duncan in the dual roles of Fanny's impoverished mother (who married for love and ended up in desperate straits) and her well-to-do but drug-addicted aunt, Lady Bertram, suggests the harsh choices forced on women in those days. The absence of frilly decor also allows the director to concentrate on the characters. Ms. O'Connor's likable Fanny suggests a quick-witted, wised-up 90's version of a 1940's Jennifer Jones heroine.

Biting his lips and looking alternately sheepish and pious, Mr. Miller reins in his swashbuckling energy to make a credibly humble Edmund. Mr. Nivola's Henry conveys the pouting narcissism lurking just beneath a surface charm. But the movie's most imposing performance is Mr. Pinter's thunderous Sir Bertram. A quintessential 19th-century English patriarch, he is the embodiment of an overweening male authority, which the upstart Fanny and subsequent generations of rebellious women feel impelled to disobey. The movie is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations. MANSFIELD PARK Written and directed by Patricia Rozema; based on the novel ''Mansfield Park'' by Jane Austen, and her letters and early journals; director of photography, Michael Coulter; edited by Martin Walsh; music by Lesley Barber; production designer, Christopher Hobbs; produced by Sarah Curtis; released by Miramax Films and BBC Films. Running time: 105 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Embeth Davidtz (Mary Crawford), Jonny Lee Miller (Edmund Bertram), Alessandro Nivola (Henry Crawford), Frances O'Connor (Fanny Price), Lindsay Duncan (Mrs. Price, Lady Bertram) and Harold Pinter (Sir Thomas Bertram).

Question: Sir Thomas Bertram owns which estate in an 1814 novel?
Answer: Mansfield Park