SOURCE: “Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 58-83.

In the following excerpt, Wiltshire probes the psychological focus and narrative technique of Mansfield Park.

Mansfield Park was published only a year after Pride and Prejudice, but moving from one novel to the other the reader is keenly aware of a change of tone and atmosphere. Partly it is that Mansfield Park is evidently the work of an older, maturer, woman. The narrator is not an intrusive presence, by any means, but one who, while an insider of the world she depicts, can also see beyond it. ‘Poor woman! she probably thought change of air might agree with many of her children’, she remarks of the beleaguered Mrs. Price at the conclusion of chapter 1 ([Mansfield Park hereafter] MP 11). It is a voice with a...