Mansfield Park (Signet Classics) (Taschenbuch)

Mansfield Park (Signet Classics) (Taschenbuch)
von Jane Austen, Margaret Drabble

Rezensionen:

Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe'sThe Mysteries of Udolphoand Horace Walpole'sThe Castle of Otrantowere all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own novels. In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic fiction would be horridly out of place; marriage was, first and foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Certain rules applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and married and what one expected afterwards. To flout these rules was to tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be terrible. Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. InMansfield Park, for example, Austen gives us Fanny Price, a poor young woman who has grown up in her wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal. The only one who has truly been kind to Fanny is Edmund Bertram, the younger of the family's two sons.

Into this Cinderella existence comes Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, who are visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Soon Mansfield Park is given over to all kinds of gaiety, including a daring interlude spent dabbling in theatricals. Young Edmund is smitten with Mary, and Henry Crawford woos Fanny. Yet these two charming, gifted, and attractive siblings gradually reveal themselves to be lacking in one essential Austenian quality: principle. Without good principles to temper passion, the results can be disastrous, and indeed,Mansfield Parkis rife with adultery, betrayal, social ruin, and ruptured friendships. But thisisa comedy, after all, so there is also a requisite happy ending and plenty of Austen's patented gentle satire along the way. Describing the switch in Edmund's affections from Mary to Fanny, she writes: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people." What doesnotvary is the pleasure with which new generations come to Jane Austen.--Alix Wilber

The Mansfield Park of the title, a magnificent, idyllic estate which is home to the wealthy Bertram family, stands as a bastion of English tradition and stability. The novel's heroine, Fanny Price, is a "poor relation" living with the Bertrams, acutely conscious of her inferior status and yet daring to love their son Edmund--but from afar. However, with five marriageable young people on the premises, the peace at Mansfield cannot last. Courtships, entertainments and intrigues throw the place into turmoil, and Fanny finds herself unwillingly competing with a dazzlingly witty and lovely rival. As critic Margaret Drabble has pointed out, the house becomes "full of the energies of discord--sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion, and vanity," and the novel becomes ever more engrossing as it builds to Mansfield's final scandal and, finally, a satisfying conclusion. Unique in its moral design and brilliant interplay of the forces of tradition and change,Mansfield Parkwas the first novel of Jane Austen's maturity, and the first in which the author turned her unerring eye on the concerns of English society at a time of great upheaval.-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe:Taschenbuch

Alle Rezensionen ansehen...

Angebote zu Mansfield , Park , Signet ab 1 Euro!

Siehe auch folgende Artikel:

Northanger Abbey (Penguin Popular Classics) von Jane Austen
Emma. von Jane Austen
Persuasion von Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice von Jane Austen

Mehr zu Drabble, Margaret, Austen, Jane, Classics, Austen, Jane, Paperback

Home ..., Angebote ansehen ..., Begleitseite ...

Herausgeber dieser Seite ist DomainLoc.com GmbH - Partner von Amazon.de