Tag Archives: Mansfield Park

Austen for Progressive Church Reform

Spiritual Sunday I have come to admire, a great deal, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Under unbelievable social and family pressure, the modest and overlooked Fanny Price sticks to her moral principles as she resists a marriage proposal from an eligible bachelor, the wealthy and dashing Henry Crawford. I have learned only recently […]

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Austen Films Underestimate Her Heroines

Film Friday I’ve been amazed at the success of the Jane Austen industry in recent years. Fan though I am, I never could have predicted the hunger for movie and television versions of her novels, movie biographies of the author, sequels to Pride and Prejudice, horror versions of her novels, novels where characters from different […]

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How to Film Austen Heroines Saying Yes

Amanda Root as Anne Elliott  Film Friday One must show a great deal of sensitivity in how one films a Jane Austen heroine accepting a marriage proposal. That’s because the author never shows us the acceptances directly. Although I am generally not a great fan of filmed versions of Jane Austen novels, I have to […]

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Heroic Reading When All Are against You

While it made sense that my student Mary would be drawn to Northanger Abbey (see my Thursday and Friday posts), Mansfield Park was the Jane Austen novel that brought out her best. She identified with the heroine Fanny Price for very understandable reasons. With her speech impairment, Mary, like Fanny, grew up feeling marginalized as […]

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Reading Austen to Handle Adversity

In recent posts I have been writing about how young people in the 18th century found moral guidance in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, even though the novel was attacked for corrupting them.  Over the next four posts I will tell an inspirational story about one of my students who found guidance in the novels of […]

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