Mansfield Park

At ten, Fanny Price is sent from her large, poor family in Portsmouth to be brought up by her rich uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, at Mansfield Park. Timid, bullied by her aunt Mrs Norris and treated as an inferior by her cousins, she finds kindness only from her cousin Edmund. While Sir Thomas is away at his plantations in Antigua, the young people stage a risqué play, and the arrival of the charming Henry and Mary Crawford brings flirtation and danger. When Henry proposes to Fanny, she refuses him, against everyone's wishes, and her quiet firmness is put to the test.

Jane Austen published the novel in 1814. Fanny divides readers more than any other Austen heroine, and the brief references to the family's wealth from slave plantations became the subject of Edward Said's famous essay 'Jane Austen and Empire'. It is her most serious novel about character and principle; her next, Emma, is her most comic.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) grew up in a crowded rectory in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of eight children, writing comic sketches to amuse her family. She never married, lived quietly in Bath and then in a cottage at Chawton, and published her novels anonymously, signed only 'By a Lady'. She died in Winchester at forty-one.

Her six novels, from Pride and Prejudice to Emma and Persuasion, turn the small world of country families, marriages and money into sharp, funny studies of character. Her ironic narration, slipping in and out of her heroines' thoughts, changed the way novels are written.