Begun in 1811 at the height of Jane Austen's writing powers and published in 1814, Mansfield Park is her most profound novel.  Fanny Price is unlike any of Austen's previous heroines, a girl from a poor family brought up in a splendid country house and possessed of a vast reserve of moral fortitude and imperturbability. Through the stories of Fanny Price she tackles the themes of faith and constancy and the threat that metropolitan manners could pose to a rural way of life.

 
Carol Shields is the author of Jane Austen (Penguin Lives), The Stone Diaries, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Larry's Party, Happenstance, and Dressing Up for the Carnival, among other novels. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.


From the Trade Paperback edition.