Mansfield Park and Persuasion are Jane Austen’s two most serious novels – not as obviously witty and playful as the others, but nevertheless among her greatest achievements. Very different though they are, it makes some sense to take them together. In both, there is a new sense of the wider world beyond the immediate provincial middle-class setting – a world of trade and empire, where Sir Thomas must visit his estates in the Caribbean, and Captain Wentworth serves in the British navy against Napoleon. The old, familiar values are exposed to new challenges: from the modern, ‘London’ way of thinking which the Crawfords bring to Mansfield, and from the new forms of human relationship associated with the naval community in Persuasion.
In these new contexts, both Austen’s heroines are vulnerable to an acute sense of displacement or homelessness. Fanny Price has been taken from her family home and transplanted, as a kind of foster-child, into the superior but intimidating environment of Mansfield Park. Anne Elliot’s ancestral home is put up for let, and she spends most of the novel moving from place to place as a temporary resident, much as Austen herself did in the years before she wrote her later works. This geographical rootlessness goes together with a more personal vulnerability: Fanny is a mere dependant, fearful of appearing presumptuous; Anne has gone past marriageable age; and both are slighted and neglected by those around them (as well as by generations of readers greedy for another Elizabeth Bennet). How, in their essentially lonely situations, can they communicate themselves to others?
It is this question which Austen explores and deepens in the course of these novels. She addresses it largely through style, through the narrative art which reaches towards the hidden life of her characters, intimating on their behalf what they cannot readily say. To attend properly to Austen’s characters is also to attend to her authorial voice, and to how this negotiates the gap between internal life and the world of social performance. In our classes we shall be looking closely at specific passages from the two novels, reading them together with all these things in mind.
