SOURCE: “Mansfield Park: Ideology and Execution,” in New Casebooks: Mansfield Park and Persuasion, edited by Judy Simons, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997, pp. 19-36.

In the following excerpt originally published in 1975, Butler explores the ideological conflicts—particularly between Fanny Price's Christianity and the Crawford's materialism—in Mansfield Park.

With the possible exception of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park is the most visibly ideological of Jane Austen's novels, and as such has a central position in any examination of Jane Austen's philosophy as expressed in her art. It is all the more revealing because here she has progressed far beyond the technical immaturity of the period when Sense and Sensibility was conceived, to a position where she can exploit to the full the artistic possibilities of the conservative case; and, at the same time, come face to face with the difficulties it presents. By far the most imaginative and accomplished of...