Deidre Lynch thinks everyone should read “Mansfield Park.”
Jane Austen may be best known for the romantic and witty “Pride and Prejudice,” but Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature in the Department of English, wants readers to see the 19th-century novelist as more than a “rom-com writer.”
“The marriage plot is not the thing Austen is most interested in,” Lynch said. “She’s interested in how difficult it is to be a good person. She’s interested in inequality and domination, and power. She’s interested in how people who don’t have a lot of power nonetheless preserve their principles. What is independence of mind even if you don’t have financial or political independence?”
This year marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth — and for a woman who had to publish all of her works anonymously, she’s now more visible than ever. In addition to new editions of the novels, a fresh wave of film and TV treatments have been recently released or are in the works, including “Miss Austen,” “Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius,” and “The Other Bennet Sister” (all BBC), and “Pride and Prejudice” (Netflix).
Lynch, who teaches “Jane Austen’s Fictions and Fans,” said the novelist’s work continues to resonate in part because of her minimalist style, which makes the fiction easy to modernize. “Clueless” (1995) and “Fire Island” (2022) are two examples.
“Her plots are fairly uncluttered and unlike many other 19th-century novelists, she doesn’t spend a lot of time describing her characters or settings, so it makes it easier to slot ourselves from the 21st century into her books,” Lynch explained. “The characters are so vivid and life-like, we all feel as though we know a Mrs. Bennet or a Mr. Woodhouse or a Mr. Collins.”
Samantha Matherne, professor of philosophy, became interested in the moral, aesthetic, and epistemic themes of Austen’s work after rereading “Sense and Sensibility” a few years ago — a rediscovery that inspired her course “The Philosophy of Jane Austen.”
Samantha Matherne.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Deidre Lynch.
Photo courtesy of Deidre Lynch
Is Austen a philosopher? Not exactly, Matherne said (though it’s a question students debate in her course). Austen saw herself first and foremost as a novelist, but she explored philosophical ideas through narrative rather than formal argument.
“If you think about ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ both novels are exploring the concepts that are in the titles and asking, ‘Should they have a role in one’s life?’” Matherne said. “Austen seems to say pride and prejudice are vices that get in the way of morality and knowledge — and romance! You do get Austen advocating for a picture of the good life as one in which you’re balancing sense and sensibility, as I think both the characters Elinor and Marianne come to do developmentally over the course of the novel.”
Matherne’s course also asks students to discuss whether Austen is even interested in romance. As Matherne pointed out, every novel might follow a marriage plot, but the weddings themselves get little narrative attention, if Austen even describes them at all.
“These romantic symbols of the proposal and the wedding, Austen has absolutely no interest in,” Matherne said. “She’s interested in loving relationships between couples, between friends, between communities; that’s the romance of Austen. This is why reading the novels is a different experience than watching movies, because you get the interiority of love and romance. You need words on the page to describe the rush of emotions and the ambiguity of emotions and the doubt, hope, anger, and fear.”
“She’s interested in loving relationships between couples, between friends, between communities; that’s the romance of Austen.”
Samantha Matherne
That is why “Mansfield Park,” Matherne and Lynch agree, is the perfect book for digging into Austen’s heavier themes. Written right after “Pride and Prejudice,” the novel has a less charismatic heroine and takes a darker direction on issues that aren’t typically associated with Austen: class, inequality, power, and the slave trade, referenced through the sugar plantation in Antigua that sustains the Bertram family’s fortune.
“Students get really interested in the ways in which Austen is commenting on the history of empire and slavery and race,” Lynch said. “Many of them end up saying, ‘“Mansfield Park” is absolutely my favorite,’ because of the ways in which it takes on these questions of power.”
“Students get really interested in the ways in which Austen is commenting on the history of empire and slavery and race.”
Deidre Lynch
“The focus of ‘Mansfield Park’ is really diffuse. It roams around the different characters and dynamics,” Matherne agreed. “Austen is trying to give us a novel of a social world rather than the novel of one character or one romantic pairing.”
For the uninitiated, Lynch recommended starting with “Pride and Prejudice” as the most accessible entry point before moving to the other novels, not forgetting the “Juvenilia,” a collection of pieces Austen wrote as a teenager.
“I do hope that anybody who starts with ‘Pride and Prejudice’ goes on to all the others as well,” said Lynch, who encourages students to read all six Austen novels every year. “She’s the person who convincingly figured out what the novel form could do and could be and wrote to improve it. She’s a totally brilliant novelist.”