Review: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Having a Kindle can be, at first, intoxicating.  What books to download first?  What to read?  There are so many good ones, and so many that are FREE!  Yet, for some reason, my mind went immediately to one that I had picked up twelve years prior, and then put down with disinterest.  I wanted to give it another shot.  I really did.

And wow.  Am I glad now, that I took it up again!

Jane Austen.  Like millions of people before me, I think I might very well be in love with her.  I'm completely enamored of her writing style, and this book has skyrocketed right to the top of my list of favorite books ever.

I saw the 1999 film "Mansfield Park" when it was in theatres, and I fell in love with the heroine, Fanny Price, and her snobbish but (generally) well-meaning relatives, the Bertrams, especially her gallant and humble cousin Edmund.  The film Fanny Price is very diffferent from the literary heroine of the same name; however, she is no less endearing.  Movie-Fanny (played by Frances O'Connor) is fiesty, plucky, and adventurous, where Book-Fanny is quiet, demure, and delicate.  Both "incarnations" of Fanny Price are eminently relateable, though entirely different in nature.

The world of Mansfield Park, a manor in Northamptonshire, England, at the turn of the 19th century, is beautiful and constantly proper, yet possess an undercurrent of turmoil and tempestuousness.  The primary characters -- Fanny, her cousins Edmund, Tom, Maria, and Julia, and their charming and tempting neighbors, brother and sister pair Mary and Henry Crawford -- attempt to walk the delicate line between what is proper in society, and what matters most in the depths of their hearts.  Without spoiling the ending for those of you who are yet to read it (and if you haven't read it, you should), some characters fail in this task, and some succeed.  It's a beautiful story, at its heart, a love story, absolutely timeless.

I only wish (as I said before) that I had discovered Lady Jane so much earlier, like when I was a misguided young woman with a torrid love life, instead of now that I am married very comfortably to a very steadfast and dependable man.  But no matter.  I will spend the majority of 2011 making up for lost time.