John Sutherland

Mr. Jolyon Connell

Few novels have divided critics more than Mansfield Park. It has been fiercely argued over for more than 200 years, and with good reason: it is open to radically different interpretations. At its broadest, it is a novel about the condition of England, setting up an opposition, as the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin has put it, between someone with strongly held religious and moral principles who will not consider a marriage that is not based on true feeling, and is revolted by sexual immorality, and “a group of worldly, highly cultivated, entertaining and well-to-do young people who pursue pleasure without regard for religious or moral principles”. Many have dismissed the heroine, Fanny Price, as a mere picture of goodness, but the author of this guide, John Wiltshire, one of the most respected and original of modern Austen critics, dismisses this argument. “The still, principled fulcrum of moral right, celebrated and excoriated by earlier critics,” he says, is now “understood to be a trembling, unstable entity”, an “erotically driven and conflicted figure”. Indeed, in part at least, this is a novel about female desire – the plot revolves around the passionate feelings of two young women, Fanny and Maria. The argument that it is a straightforward defence of the conservative way of life is hard to sustain; it is more plausibly seen as questioning the whole patriarchal basis of society, and in particular the extent to which women were trapped by a system over which they had no control. Far from being devoid of irony, it is now frequently, and perhaps rightly, thought of as the most ironic of all Austen’s novels.

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Cedric Watts

Few novels have caused more of a stir than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In England, the Duchess of Abercorn stated that she divided her dinner-guests according to their view of Tess. If they deemed her “a little harlot”, she put them in one group; if they said “Poor wronged innocent!”, she put them in another. It is a telling illustration of the novel’s word-of-mouth success. The Daily News wittily claimed that “pessimism (we had almost said Tessimism) is popular and fashionable”. Fan-mail arrived: Hardy said that his mail from readers even included confessional letters from various wives who, like Tess, had gained premarital sexual experience but, unlike her, had not told their husbands of it. Hardy’s fame was now so great that he was a frequent guest at fashionable dinner parties. In 1892 he recorded that Tess’s fame had spread round the world and that translations were multiplying, “its publication in Russia exciting great interest”. Controversy generated publicity. Publicity generated prosperity. Sales of Tess far surpassed those of any of Hardy’s previous works, and between 1900 and 1930 was reprinted “some forty times in England alone”. In addition to making Hardy famous and rich, the scandalous Tess attracted, and has continued to attract, an extraordinary range of critical opinion. Victorian reviewers, humanists, neo-Marxists, deconstructionists, cultural materialists, new historicists: everyone has had something to say about the novel. This book, drawing on the best of these critics, shows why, for all its faults, it has such power, and explains the angry and uncompromising vision of the world contained within its pages.

Mr. Jolyon Connell

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