Jane Austen was noted as a novelist of manners whose works are structured around irony and interpersonal relations governed by status and the rules of social class. Mansfield Park is a novel abut Sir Thomas Bertram and his family, representatives of the landed gentry in the time of the writing of the novel. It might seem then that the story was so much a product of a time and place that it had little to say to our contemporary society, but this is not the case. Austen above all is a novelist who delves deeply into human character, and people then and people today are not that different in what they want from life or in how they relate to other people at a basic level. We may have little in common with the landed gentry in terms of their economic or social position. For one thing, the stratification of British society in general is foreign to us, though America does have social classes of a sort based on economic and educational attainment more than on birth. The heroine of this novel, Fanny, faces a wrenching change
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