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vincebingo 's review for:
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen
Very interesting for about 200 pages and then a bit of a slog for the rest; too many narcissists sitting around and thinking.
Doesn’t discredit what Austen was ultimately striving for - certainly the subjugation and transformation of Fanny Price from meek coastal girl to the mistress of a grand estate is an exciting one, with plenty of embedded social drama. Ultimately though, the messaging just becomes a little too vague and inconsistent, reading as either conservative or almost radical from one passage to the other. The inconsistency wouldn’t be as much of an issue if I could like any of the characters at all or care about anything that was happening.
Certainly those first 200 or so pages — where it’s just so gleefully mean that it’s almost Dickensian — are very fun and exciting, but I didn’t get as much out of it as I would’ve liked after that point.
Doesn’t discredit what Austen was ultimately striving for - certainly the subjugation and transformation of Fanny Price from meek coastal girl to the mistress of a grand estate is an exciting one, with plenty of embedded social drama. Ultimately though, the messaging just becomes a little too vague and inconsistent, reading as either conservative or almost radical from one passage to the other. The inconsistency wouldn’t be as much of an issue if I could like any of the characters at all or care about anything that was happening.
Certainly those first 200 or so pages — where it’s just so gleefully mean that it’s almost Dickensian — are very fun and exciting, but I didn’t get as much out of it as I would’ve liked after that point.