If you are going to listen to this book - at least aleviate the task by choosing another narrator. She speaks clearly, but with such tones and inflections as to make you dislike EVERY character. Publishing History An advertisement in The Star on May 9, 1814, announced the release of a new novel from the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) Mansfield Park is Jane Austens 1814 novel focusing on Fanny Price, the daughter of a poor Portsmouth family, who is taken to live with her aunt and uncle Bertrams family on their estate at the age of ten. It was published in July 1814 by Thomas Egerton, who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park was Jane Austen’s third published novel and her first to be conceived and written when she was an adult and living in Chawton. The narrator only adds to the trial that reading this book presents. Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between 18. Oh, if I could only bury her in the first chapters of the book. As with any angel - it is hard to believe she is alive. Furthermore, she doesn't grow as a character through the text! In Jane Austen's heroine that is unprecedented! She is just the proper, self efacing (and which is worse, extremely and sinserely self efacing) feminine ideal. The only time she grows a back bone it is to refuse an offer of marriage that she should have accepted. well, lets just say a doormat would have more interesting a character. The hero is a spoil sport and exessively full of himself, and the heroine. Both of them are such prudes you really want them to get together just so they wouldn't spoil anyone else's life. It's amasing that Jane Austen would produce such an unsimpathetic heroine and hero. (And I stand by this assertion, even though I'm an avid Austen fan.) Also, I believe there are Abridged versions available with a different narrator - an advantage if there ever was one.

There is truly little in this book that could not be cut out without making the book better. But in this case - go for the abridged one. I always believed in reading Unabridged versions of books.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen