The best part of Mansfield Park is when Sir Thomas comes home from Antigua and obliterates the play. Rolls up, finds out they turned his bedroom into a green room or something and shuts it down. No anger, no yelling, no harsh language. A few quiet words to the servants, that’s all.

The Stern Victorian Father is like all stereotypes. But this is a character it’s hard to disrespect.

Edmund disappointed me a couple of times. First by falling in love with Mary, who he knew very well didn’t share his high principles. Then by failing to tell his father what had been going on between Henry and both his sisters. One of whom is already engaged.

Fanny, the protagonist, is meek but has integrity. Austen tests that integrity over and over again, increasing the pressure on it bit by bit. By the end, everybody she respects is telling her to do something she knows is wrong. There’s no way to explain herself, and she’s miserable. But she maintains her integrity, and good for her.

She gets the reward for that integrity in the end, marrying her childhood crush. Who should have realized what a treasure was right under his nose from the beginning. (Which you expect in a Jane Austen novel.)

In my view, most of the novel is a gigantic, elegant picture frame for this tiny portrait. The woman who won’t betray her principles, although it pierces her to the heart to look so ungrateful and foolish.

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Emma by Jane Austen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Jane Austen is a great writer, and Emma contains all her trademark wit, humor and sardonic commentary. The protagonist, however, is difficult to like. And that a 20-year-old woman could behave this way strains credulity; she seems like she just turned 14. But maybe the point of the character is that she’s particularly immature. And she does grow up a little over the course of the book.

There’s a flaw in the plot construction, too, that’s linked with Emma’s character: the only thing preventing the happy ending from happening on the first page is Emma’s ignorance of her own feelings. She’s constantly talking about how Mr. Knightly is so much better than every other man, and he’s so rich and well-mannered and handsome and smart, and he’s the only living person whose good opinion she cares about, but no, she’s not going to get married.

If Emma had listened to herself talk for ten minutes on page 1, the book would have been over by page 20. It’s true that there’s some plot development connected with Emma’s realization that she loves Mr. Knightly, but that realization could have come about in any number of ways, and the only reason it didn’t happen sooner, or later, was the author’s whim. You feel a little cheated when the story ends that way. There should be more of an element of necessity to it.

I almost think that the actual story here is Jane Fairfax’s, and the marriage of Anne Taylor as the inciting incident, and Emma’s marriage as the happy ending, are just convenient bookends to kick things off and shut them down again.



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