‘A Good Spot for Fault-Finding’: Reading Criticism in Mansfield Park

Abstract

The first of Austen’s novels to be begun and completed in the nineteenth century, Mansfield Park, demonstrates Austen’s ongoing preoccupation with the literature of the eighteenth century. Just as importantly, the novel evinces Austen’s interest in the rapidly changing nature of literary culture in England. Bakhtin argues that ‘when the novel becomes the dominant genre … almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent “novelized”’, and this cooption of other genres to the services of the novel lies at the heart of Austen’s work.¹ In Mansfield Park Austen takes on once again the question of what belongs, or does not belong, in a novel. In Sense and Sensibility she focused on the issue of representation, that is, the limitations of what could be shown in a novel. In Mansfield Park Austen turns to the equally important question of genre, exploring the novel’s potential to reflect on, cannibalise and transform not only other novels, but also oral legend, epic poetry and biography.

You may be assured I read every line with the greatest interest & am more delighted with it than my humble pen can express. The excellent delineation of Character, sound sense, Elegant Language & the pure morality with which it abounds, makes it a most desirable as well as useful work, & reflects the highest honour &c. &c. — Universally admired in Edinburgh, by all the wise ones. — Indeed, I have not heard a single fault given to it

‘Opinions of Mansfield Park’ (MW, 433)