6/29/2023 0 Comments Edward said mansfield park![]() In 1928, Arnold Bennett felt compelled to preface his Evening Standard column thus: “The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause”. As Reginald Farrar observed, in James Austen-Leigh’s 1865 A Memoir of Jane Austen, his aunt “does not even die for us of anything in particular, but fades out, with Victorian gentility, in a hazy unspecified decline”. In part this resulted from the careful management of her legacy affected by her family and its descendants who sought, through selective destruction and strategic interpretation of correspondence and memoirs, to refine her into an acceptable vision of genteel spinsterhood. In the century or so after her novels were first published, Jane Austen (1775-1817) received much appreciation but little criticism. Lionel Trilling also once wrote that opinions about Jane Austen’s novels “are almost as interesting and almost as important to think about as the work itself”. ‘Mansfield Park is a great novel, its greatness being commensurate with its power to offend.’ ![]()
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