Review | Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

#QOTD – Which is your least favourite Austen?

I haven’t read all of them yet, but Mansfield Park falls behind Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice in many ways. As usual, the plot is centered around marriage and ‘marriage economics’. And, as always, Austen is quite successful at introducing a unique perspective to make things interesting, but Fanny Price is a rigid, boring and a humorless heroine, and Edmund Bertram is a dull hero.

There’s also just no real love story here. About a quarter of the book is devoted to the sheer horror of Fanny living with a few rich kids and all of them putting on a play. Two thirds of it follows Fanny harrowing over the unwanted affections of some guy, who is more interesting than the actual love interest. The real romance begins and ends in seemingly the last chapter of the book.

I would really like to pretend that this book is not part of the collected works of Jane Austen thank you very much!