Okay, I hate this book. I mean, hate it. Fanny, the main character, is a doormat. Edmund, the (1st!) cousin with whom we’re supposed to want her to end up, kind of domineering and condescending. And he’s the nice guy in the book. Everyone else is horrid to her until at least 3/4 of the way through the plot, with the exception of her mostly-absent brother.
It’s just emotionally draining to read 48 chapters of abuse, discouragement, disregard, and condescension. Never mind the fact that Fanny’s seeming only appeal as a main character is her moral purity. Both of the film adaptations I’ve seen of this one have clearly not known what to do with such a flat, abused character, and so they’ve rendered her livelier, more outgoing, and more fascinating in general than her character is explicitly written.
It’s not that it’s a dull read, or that the outcome isn’t, in its way, satisfying, or that the characters aren’t vivid- but as with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Austen has managed, in my opinion, to write a novel entirely without a hero. I find as little to admire in Fanny’s subservient defenselessness as I do in Mary Crawford’s moral uncertainty, Tom Bertram’s wastrel lifestyle, and even Henry Crawford’s ruinous dalliances with women. Do I write with all the snobbish certainty of my own century and its liberal views of what makes a woman good? Certainly- and with pride. Mansfield Park is a painstaking read, not because the writing is bad, but because the people are.