For the Ignatius Study Guide for Mansfield Park, click here.

In all things, Jane Austen was a woman of faith. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Mansfield Park, her most neglected, abused, and misunderstood novel. Like Austen's other novels, it can be fully appreciated only when illuminated by the virtuous life and Christian beliefs of the author herself.

Mansfield Park is a novel about ordination, and about the family. It delves into questions of the education and upbringing of children, of conservative values, of parental authority, of the propriety and place of romantic love, of the tension between propriety and sophistication, and of the dangers of undue familiarity outside the family circle. It unerringly displays the depth of Austen's wisdom, especially in her understanding of the spiritual, psychological, and cultural complexities of morality.

A look at the essays

• "'The Greatest of Nuisances'? Fanny Price as Work in Progress in Mansfield Park" – Katy Carl
• "Mansfield Park and Isaiah 53: Fanny Price's Redemptive Role" – Paul J. Contino
• "The Economic, Social, Romantic, and Moral Aspects of Marriage in Mansfield Park" – Mitchell Kalpakgian
• "Mansfield Park and the Conscience Outside the Self" – Theresa Kenney
• "Jane Austen, William Cobbett, and Jacobin Virtues" – Alasdair MacIntyre
• "On the Uses of Irony and the Limits of Moralism in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park" –Regis Martin
• "Liberty, Restraint, and Social Order in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park" – Jack Trotter

Eleanor Bourg Nicholson situates the reader with the introductory essay.