"A Better Guide in Ourselves": Jane Austen's Mansfield Park on Education and the Novel

Abstract

The least popular of all her novels, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) depicts a heroine, precariously situated in the margins of the aristocracy, who is intellectually educated rather than accomplished. As the timid Fanny Price navigates the morally fraught social world of Mansfield Park, Austen comments on the exclusion and mistreatment of women in the British public sphere at large as well as criticizes the practice of educating women into accomplishment as exemplified by the sparkling socialite, Mary Crawford. This thesis positions Austen in context with educational writers William Cowper, the poet, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher. I analyze all three writers’ messages about education, along with the implications of the genre/form with which they choose to enter public discourses, including the poem, the political tract, and the novel. Considering the historical and cultural conceptions of the novel as trivial and feminine during Austen’s day, her decision to employ this form suggests that she is interested in reforming the novel into a platform for serious public engagement. Austen ultimately anticipates the Victorian novel by revealing the form’s potential value as intellectual exercise and an important tool for women to join public conversation.