9 August 2019 - Fanny Price

Is our protagonist Fanny Price a hero or an antihero? All victorious Austen characters are required to have, or to attain, good morals and good manners, which are of course the same thing. But in Mansfield Park, good manners are set up as depending on sober gravitas, while at the same time the author’s voice archly comments “The enthusiasm of a woman’s love is even beyond the biographer’s.” I think Austen is committing meta-satire, making fun of her own story to undermine its surface message. That is why the heroine has the meaningful name “Fanny Price”.