Jane Austen's World

In Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park,” published originally in 1814, fine society is the properly mannered wealthy, by birthright and practiced education. Mansfield Park, the vast English estate of a very rich man, Sir Thomas Bertram, and his family, is captured in “Mansfield Park” the book as home to privilege, home to wealth born of slave-holding plantations in the Caribbean, not unlike those of the American South of the Civil War. Mansfield Park is playground to people who see themselves as favored humans, as people who are educated in the finest traditions, but maybe they are not really educated at all. Through the device largely of the kind and subdued, even timid, protagonist Fanny Price, eventual moral heroine of this novel, we get to peek first into life at the extensive Mansfiel…