The Biogeography of Mansfield Park

Jane Austen prided herself on being an astute observer, and her letters are riddled with a shrewd understanding of character and place. She would have liked the field of biogeography, which scientists described as "…the science that attempts to document and understand spatial patterns of biodiversity. It is the study of distributions of organisms, both past and present, and of related patterns of variation over the earth in the numbers and kinds of living things….(Brown)". Although the field of biogeography was just emerging in the scientific community of Austen’s time, the way she weaves together the lives of her characters into the spaces they inhabit is important and relevant. In this essay, we explore Mansfield Park and the character species that inhabit it.