“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.” Fanny Price is adopted into the family of her rich uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. Brought up with the four Bertram children, she is condescendingly treated as a poor relation by ‘Aunt Norris,’ a satirical portrait of a busybody. Of her cousins, only Edmund, a young clergyman, appreciates her fine qualities, and she falls in love with him. Edmund, unfortunately is irresistibly drawn to the shallow, worldly Mary Crawford… Mary is seeming the quintessential Jane Austen heroine. Gregarious, warm-hearted, and, above all else, witty, she displays all the familiar Austen virtues, and she stands in need of the familiar Austen lessons as well. Like Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ she banters archly with the man she is falling in love with, and, like Elizabeth, she must learn to set aside her preconceptions in order to recognize that love. Like Emma Woodhouse, the heroine of ‘Emma,’ she speaks more brilliantly and speculates more dazzlingly than anyone around her, and, like Emma, she must learn to rein in the wit that tempts her at times to impropriety. But Mary Crawford is not the heroine of ‘Mansfield Park’—Fanny Price is, and therein lies the novel's hook. For Fanny differs not merely from Mary, but also from our most basic expectations of what a novel's protagonist should do and be. "Full of the energies of discord — sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion, and vanity." (Margaret Drabble) "Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire." (J.K. Rowling) "Austen looks at her world with a cool, undressing gaze... she is a formidable opponent of hypocrisy and sentimentality." (The Observer) Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism, biting irony and social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her works, though usually popular, were first published anonymously and brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.