SOURCE: “The Novelist as Heroine in Mansfield Park: A Study in Autobiography,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, June, 1983, pp. 136-56.

In the following essay, Halperin contends that Mansfield Park is Austen's most autobiographical novel, and considers the work's affinity with Austen's other novels.

Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's Vanity Fair. Almost everyone in it is selfish—self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and vain. This helps make it her most unpleasant novel—and her most controversial. For years critics have exercised themselves trying to explain, justify, expound, or attack its moral slant. Misreadings of the book by otherwise sensible men and women are legion: Mansfield Park “continually and essentially holds up the vicious as admirable,” says Kingsley Amis.¹ Commentators complacently discuss the expulsion of wit and scourging of irony in Mansfield Park, pronounce Fanny Price a failure, and conclude that the novel as a whole must be one too. The book...