Mansfield Park, Annotated, with Commentary

BookDoors’ MANSFIELD PARK is the most richly annotated edition of Jane Austen’s novel available in print or online. Designed as an ebook, this and the other BookDoors In Context editions of the Austen novels offer you swift, seamless access to information and commentary.

The low price is a matter of our mission (please see bookdoors.com). These editions are designed for an audience of widely different experience and expectations. The series “Literature in Its Context” provides today’s reader with the knowledge comparable to that an informed reader of 1815 possessed and Austen took for granted. Drawing upon this material is a running interpretive discussion of MANSFIELD PARK. You’ll also find illustrations, an Austen Glossary of some 1000 words, a time-line that includes cultural, scientific, and technological developments between 1770-1817, a select bibliography, and a brief biography of Austen.

Austen observes in EMMA that "Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken." That's true of MANSFIELD PARK as well, and now, nearly two centuries later, "a little mistaken" and "a little disguised" understate the challenge.

At a basic level, MANSFIELD PARK’S diction can be obscure, for words themselves have changed or disappeared. This In Context edition defines words and phrases such as “coze,” “post-captain,” “eclaircissement,” “cant,” “window-tax,” “negus,” “apoplexy,” “court-leet and court-baron,” “competence,” “officious,” “shrubbery” (more than just bushes), “mob-cap,” “exigeant,” and “ha-ha.”

Second, the annotations address MANSFIELD PARK’S historical, social, and cultural background. For example, the novel’s opening words, “About thirty years ago,” require comment. At another point Austen refers to “Dr. Johnson’s celebrated judgement,” yet leaves it at that. The annotation explains the allusion: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures." She depends upon our knowing the relevance of the poet Cowper’s “Tirocinium”; of the meaning of “a marriage of attachment”; who Humphrey Repton was (a landscape “improver” with definite views); the associations with “a moonlight lake in Cumberland”; and just what occurs in LOVERS’ VOWS, a play central to the novel; and why one protagonist refers dismissively to “some great society of Methodists.” If sexuality and marriage constitute one axis of the novel, a spiritual as opposed to perfunctory religion constitute another, and the reader’s experience of the novel is enriched.

A third level of commentary addresses MANSFIELD PARK as a work of the literary imagination. Austen takes a risk in counterpointing a witty, appealing, “worldly” young woman against the heroine, the pale, timid, yet principled Fanny Price. Through such binaries Austen offers her most severe critique of her society’s pivotal class, the landed gentry, and especially of the reasons they marry, the consequences of their choices for their children, and of how well the gentry fulfill the responsibilities of their class and wealth. Austen senses that this historical moment, that of the Regency, is precarious. The novel also contains her most enigmatic and destructive villain. Incidentally, the commentary discusses the novel as you read, never divulging or anticipating the plot yet to unfold.

Austen writes of one of her protagonists, Emma, what’s true of all: their two supreme moral strengths are discernment (to see what's actually there) and judgment (what to make of what’s there). Austen expects no less from her readers, but promises that the reward for our keener, braver discernment will be our far greater pleasure.

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