SOURCE: “‘My Only Sister Now’: Incest in Mansfield Park,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 1-15.

In the following essay, Smith regards the happy ending of Mansfield Park to be a dismal failure and contends that the incestuous overtones of Fanny and Edmund's relationship reveal the crippling effects of sister-brother relationships within a constricted, hierarchical family structure.

Regarded as a happy ending to Mansfield Park, the marriage of Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram is a dismal failure. Jane Austen, I believe, intends this failure: as Fanny settles into smug seclusion at Mansfield, “the daughter that he wanted”¹ to Sir Thomas and sister-wife to Edmund, her marriage reveals the constrictions of family in the novel. The incestuous overtones of Fanny's relationship with Edmund suggest an approach to these constrictions that illuminates not only Mansfield Park but the effects of nineteenth-century idealization of sister-brother love. In...