I read 320 pages of Mansfield Park over Spring Break, and I haven't had time to read the last 10 pages since then. I could be reading them now, but alas, my book is at school, and I'm at home, thanks to a long weekend in honor of Easter. But here I am writing about it anyway.

Mansfield Park is almost as unique in the Austen canon as Persuasion. I've read them all: I can argue for that.  Its plot resembles Pride and Prejudice, at least superficially, but its heroine is completely unlike Elizabeth Bennet. She's shy, timid, overlooked, and hopelessly in love. It wasn't easy for me to like her. Mary Crawford is much more likeable: she's like Elizabeth Bennet, active, vivacious, and quick-witted. Only she's not Elizabeth. She's not a true lady. Fanny Price, for all her fearfulness and diffidence, stands out as the true lady: gentle, attentive, considerate, unselfish, willing to serve, willing to endure, willing to listen, and absolutely sincere. Mary Crawford, pretty, vivacious, and more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, is always calling attention to herself, always chattering, always exxaggerating her reactions and her emotions, careless of other people's feelings, incapable of true delicacy, and blunted, in her morals and sensibilities, by the way she was brought up and by the company she keeps.

It's not a very glamorous look at what it means to be a lady. Everything seems to turn out happily enough, but there's enough irony in some of the narrative remarks towards the end that I didn't come away with a goodness = happiness equation ringing in my ears. Fanny verges on too Elsie-Dinsmorish for my taste, but the book as a whole (and especially Aunt Norris and Lady Bertram) bears the Austen stamp. Not many people read this one, but they ought to: it rewards a reading.