My first read of a Jane Austen novel. I really enjoyed the story. Really well written. Ignore anyone who says this is a difficult read. For me these sorts of novels also give us a depiction of life in the early 1800s. Morals, gender roles, attitudes, entertainment, education etc.

At first I had very little that was good to say about Mansfield Park, but as soon as I truly committed myself to the moral, well mannered, but extremely shy character of Fanny Price I could hardly put it down. It is as Fanny starts to grow into her own thoughts, wishes and feelings that I started to love her almost as dearly as I do Elizabeth Bennett. Austen once again provides readers with a heroine to admire, one who follows her own sensibilities and not those of society, but the difference here is that our heroine is hidden beneath a timid, soft spoken and passive young woman, who is not always appreciated by modern readers. In many ways I wish I could go back and read it again for the first time, with more fluidity and concentration, but alas it is not to be and though I still hold 'Pride and Prejudice' as my clear favourite, I now have a place in my heart for 'Mansfield Park'.

If your experience of Jane Austen heroines is Elizabeth Bennett then you will find Fanny Price insipid but stick with her. This novel is the transition from Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion. Fanny is the quiet shy orphan who is relied on by her aunts but never pushes herself forward. Yet, at the crisis of the book it is Fanny, alone, who has the strength of character to say "No", to a request from her cousins and to a proposal of marriage. Those "No"s cost her an immense amount of scorn yet earn her the unending respect of the most powerful people in her society. With those "No"s Fanny announces her independence and gains the opportunity to have all that she has dreamed of. Fanny is not a character you take to quickly as the reader but by the end you realise that she is the most true of the young people in the novel, and the one who 'sees' most clearly.

Juliet Stevenson is the perfect reader for this classic novel. She gives each character a believable unique voice, and brings Austen's language alive with her stylish tone. Though, I would criticise the frequent interludes of, though appropriate and charming, sometimes annoying, music. Though, don't let this put you off.

488pp plus Introduction make the bare bones of Austen's third novel. Building through accretions into chapter vignettes there's a lively intelligence behind the crafting here of a story about the individual, the social mores, and linguistic clues often far too arcane, but still necessary. Lovely prose makes the reader step back to pause over the clever craftsmanship involved in this tale about 18 year old Fanny Price and her extended family. Of course, much takes place in Mansfield Park (MP) whereby two sides of socially differentiated hydra of the same family discourse, plot and rest. The decor of the main house (MP) dates 50 years earlier; the story is set 30 years before its publication. it's exciting to learn that Austen approved this version for publication during 1814 after editing. Austen's eyes have perused and her mind understood this novel which in many ways is a nice little trip through the tensions, changes and feelings between the idle rich set in Northamptonshire: the rich and the poor; the upwardly mobile, the static and the socially relegated. Austen has always struck me as a mannerist around class difference and distinctions. The 48 vignettes here extrapolate the minutiae into bigger fabrics of the canvas. Austen is an artist. This year marks 250 years since her birth (on 16th December) in Hampshire. Hampshire happens to be where I was born too. Austen, an anti-Jacobin and writer whose craft reveals focii on moments around passion, love and feeling. She throws all of that into a mixer and presents a sense of alienation and an incredibly high level of social, being and personal anxiety. It's no wonder that nobody gets what they want. Questions arise such as Was Austen sexually abused? Did she make a fatal social faux pas? MP has an aborted play within what is a social nexus story of battered, shoddy and ridiculous love. A love taking the high road into emotional lives often too mentally crippled to say what seems to be something unsaid. There is passion and desire, love and hatred; the spoils of social war and a frustrating reluctance to enter a battle of the sexes in order to clear up a social context mired in hesitancy, poverty and ritual. You could shout Wake Up! but in the end Austen's disguised intention remains in the dark. If this were Shakespeare you'd produce Much Ado About Nothing or Love Labour's Lost. It's Austen's year. Time to dust my box set and read a further five novels.