Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition

Lynch (Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard Univ.) here makes Austen's most divisive novel accessible, intriguing, and beautiful. She strikes a deft balance between information and analysis in her notes and with supporting documents that lend historical depth to the edition, while also linking the narrative to popular culture. Lynch includes an image from Austen's manuscript "Opinions of Mansfield Park," in which Austen compiled her readers' responses, and suggests that her own annotations are designed to show the continuing controversy that surrounds the 1814 novel. In her introduction and in her commentary, Lynch provides a valuable assessment of what makes Fanny Price such a difficult heroine to like, and in doing so sheds light on Austen's masterly use of free indirect discourse in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815). She also addresses the unwieldy balance between comfort and confinement in Mansfield Park. That tension drives the novel and provides a way into a text that is, for many of the protagonists, about the impossibility of escape.