Mansfield Park

But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.

Two sisters marry, one for wealth, one for love, with very different outcomes.

Years later, young Fanny Price is taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, to be brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park. It is a privilege she is never allowed to forget. Acutely aware of her humble rank and at the mercy of her aunt’s every whim and command, Fanny grows up with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally in a world in which otherwise she is beneath notice.

During Fanny’s uncle's absence in Antigua, the usually quiet household is thrown into chaos by the arrival of Mr and Miss Crawford, a fashionable brother and sister with a taste for mischief who bring with them all the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. So begins a complex and subtle game of cat and mouse where hearts are quickly won but where the cost is more than any of the players realise.

Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen's first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.

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Romantic, witty, acerbic and endlessly popular, Jane Austen’s novels are amongst the most revered, relevant and consistently readable novels in English Literature. Subtly different in tone, they range from the Gothic satire of Northanger Abbey, the drama of Pride and Prejudice and the razor-sharp observation of Emma to the poignancy and tenderness of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Persuasion.