Mansfield Park: A Tolerable Comfort

[harmony_bites]

As some of you might know, silburygirl is a serious Austen scholar; she's doing a paper on Mansfield Park and urged me to reread it when I told her it was the one Austen novel I loathed and gave me instructions on what to look for. I did and posted a review on LibraryThing and Goodreads. Sil urged me to post the review on LJ, because she wants to see what

Comments

[rpowell]

In a lot of ways, I think Mansfield Park is an outlier among Austen’s mature novels and that might be why even fans of her are thrown by it.

This comments seems like an attempt to criticize readers for not liking "MANSFIELD PARK". You accuse them of being incapable of appreciating a "mature novel" (in your words) because . . . what? Because they are not mature? Is that what you are saying? Has it ever occurred to that some readers who are capable of enjoying and appreciating a "mature novel" simply dislike "MANSFIELD PARK" because they don't consider it . . . "mature"?

Yet, in his final conversation with Mary Crawford, Mary disgusts him by criticizing her brother and Maria not for having an affair but for getting caught, focusing entirely on appearances and showing no principles.

This only strikes me as another example of Edmund's hypocrisy. He criticizes Mary for refusing to be outraged over Henry and Maria's behavior. Yet, he also criticizes Mary for failing to show any respect to her Royal Navy uncle - the same uncle who had no problem in exposing Mary to his mistress on a daily basis. Edmund was aware of this. He even mentioned this to Fanny. Yet, both remained fixed in their criticism of Mary. Mary's willingness to show respect toward a patriarchal figure seemed more important to them than the discomforts and embarrassments she had endured in the company of her uncle and his mistress.