Are you team Sotherton or Thornton Lacey? and what it says about you

[@mistykrueger]

Mansfield Park is the one JA novel, in my opinion, that needs more context in hand to appreciate what Austen was trying to do with the plot and characters. Part of this is because of the way Austen's heroine is introduced for sure.

[@linguipixie4720]

Hi! This is such a good remark! I only read MF once and didn't really appreciate it because in the end I didn't like Fanny so much (for example, I didn't understand her obsession with the theatricals in the first place) and I found some interactions between the characters very odd (why Mr Crawford suddenly takes an interest in Fanny, why Miss Crawford persues Edmund for so long in spite of his grim prospects (in her view), etc). Maybe a re-read is a good idea now ^^ (I know I sometimes hear that Jane Austen's novels are boring because they're just love stories, or just 'boogie' people sitting in parlours all day, whereas I see so much more in it... when I first read it (also bear in mind that English is not my native language), I understood the general structure of the story but felt like "I don't get the dialogues... I can 'sense' that they're roasting each other but I don't understand about what exactly"; but when I mentioned it to my best friend who had read it in French, in the end, she had the exact same impression, meaning that it wasn't so much the opacity of 19th-century English as the absence of context which made the read difficult for us)