Mansfield Park

"Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is the least popular of her works. The heroine, Fanny Price, isn’t feisty, fiery, and likable — she’s poor, shy, insecure, introverted, and awfully law-abiding. But I love her for her courage. Despite shame and contempt, she holds to what she thinks is right. Her story, like the others here, has given me deep pleasure and a whole lot to think about."

"Something as far as possible from Washington, D.C., and noisy self-righteous jackassery. "Mansfield Park," maybe?"

"This is an oddity but it is a highly moralistic novel. Fanny Price, the heroine, whom many people find rather tiresome, is a highly moral and articulate character and one of the things that intrigues me so much is that Jane Austen at the beginning of the 19th century had the correct view that you can’t be morally involved unless you feel strongly that some things are good and some things are bad. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If we go back to humanity all being in the same boat and we have responsibility for all the other people in the boat you’ve got to feel in your guts that if you rock the boat you are harming everybody and they are your responsibility. Fanny Price comes up with the moral condemnation: ‘They do not feel as they ought.’ Jane Austen is absolutely right. Children ought to be brought up to be moral agents, to teach them to feel in certain ways, to ask them how they would feel if someone else took their chair. They’ve got to learn to control their feelings and understand how other people feel. If you don’t teach people to think morally then society really is at the end of the road."