As some of you know, I’ve been reviewing books for RT Book Reviews for a little over a year, and specifically mysteries and thrillers for the past seven or so months. Because I live close to the RT office, I’ve been known to stroll over to pick over the selections and take back a bundle of books for any given month. And so it was that I came across this title:
Murder at Mansfield Park, by Lynn Shepherd
Knowing how I feel about the plethora of sequels and adaptations and misguided mashups of Austen’s work, you might think I would’ve thrown this book across the room without so much as a peek inside the cover. But I was intrigued. Out of all the novels Austen wrote, I would have thought Mansfield Park the least likely to pique a writer’s creative makeover urges. It’s not as glamorous as Emma or Pride and Prejudice, not as sweet as Sense and Sensibility, not as maturely romantic as Persuasion. Neither the heroine or hero of Mansfield Park are very bold or lively. From what I can gather, most people who generally like Jane Austen rank Mansfield Park as their least favorite. I will admit, it’s not one of my favorites either, but I think it deserves more credit than it tends to get.
And I do not think the vitriol with which literary critics have lambasted Fanny Price, heroine of Mansfield Park, is warranted. The most widely quoted is Kingsley Amis, who called Fanny Price “a monster of complacency and pride [hiding] under a cloak of cringing self-abasement.” While it is true that Fanny Price is no Elizabeth Bennet — she’s timid and cautious where Lizzie is vivacious and headstrong — I’ve always seen her as an Ugly Duckling/Cinderella figure more than anything else. She’s taken from her own impoverished family to live with wealthy relations, and while her older cousins are not overtly cruel to her, the understanding is that Fanny is not their equal and they all should be conscious of that fact. As patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram tells the family, “I should wish to see them very good friends, and would, on no account, authorize in my girls the smallest degree of arrogance towards their relation; but still they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights, and expectations, will always be different.” It’s worth noting that in a number of film and television adaptations of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas gives this speech directly to his daughters. And even without the evil stepsister figures, Fanny has a wicked stepmother figure in Mrs. Norris, who treats Fanny as her personal servant and goes out of her way to exclude Fanny from family outings.
Given all this, it always made perfect sense to me that Fanny is as quiet and shy as she is. She’s consistently, purposely kept down by an entire family with the weight and validation of the early 19th-century British class system behind them. That she blossoms into a moderately attractive young woman with keen observation skills and a small amount of wit that she’s only comfortable expressing when with close friends, and then winds up marrying the man of her dreams — marrying up, let’s not forget — is entirely in keeping with a conventional fairy tale.
All this is to say that I was decidedly curious about Shepherd’s Murder at Mansfield Park. The book jacket promised “an irreverent twist” on the original novel, and I thought that since this twist involved neither a sequel or a prequel, that it didn’t make Mary and Henry Crawford vampires or Tom Bertram a werewolf or the late Mr. Norris a zombie, the more likely I was to enjoy it.
And I loved it. I mean, LOVED. Right away it’s clear that Shepherd had an impeccable sense of Austen’s language and tone. She borrows liberally from the original (The first two sentences are identical, and other lines are lifted outright) but it’s obviously done as a framing device — she’s not adding anything to Mansfield Park, this IS Mansfield Park, re-imagined. The same events happen — the plan to perform Lovers’ Vows, the excursion to Compton — straight through to the middle of the book, when the murder occurs. It’s an alternate universe Mansfield Park.
So what’s different? First and foremost, in Shepherd’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price is no longer poor, but a wealthy heiress, richer than the Bertrams. She comes to live at Mansfield Park after her parents are killed in an accident. And Fanny is no longer modest and meek — she’s proud, spoiled, and horribly condescending.
Edmund Bertram, Austen’s hero, is now Edmund Norris, Mrs. Norris’ stepson. Mrs. Norris is as hateful as ever, and is actively arranging for Fanny and Edmund to marry so that she may benefit from the Price fortune.
Mary Crawford, the character most people think should have been the heroine of Austen’s novel, as she embodies all of the charm and wit and verve of an Elizabeth Bennet type, except that she’s also shallow and a little wild and self-gratifying, is the true heroine of Murder at Mansfield Park. Delightfully, Shepherd retains most of Mary Crawford’s speeches, and in the mouth of someone with a stronger sense of ethics, they’re perfectly charming. It’s Mary who steps up after the murder to help investigate the crime — and she has a few secrets from her past that grant her a certain amount of insight. If it’s diverting to read Shepherd’s inventive changes to Mansfield Park, it’s impossible to put the book down once the mystery is afoot.
I think that it would be possible to enjoy Murder at Mansfield Park if you aren’t familiar with Austen’s novel . . . but imagine how much richer the experience would be if you were.
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