Penguin Clothbound Classics / Mansfield Park

Chapter I

About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon,with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luckto captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park,in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raisedto the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comfortsand consequences of an handsome house and large income.All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match,and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at leastthree thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it.She had two sisters to be benefited by her elevation;and such of their acquaintance as thought Miss Ward and MissFrances quite as handsome as Miss Maria, did not scrupleto predict their marrying with almost equal advantage.But there certainly are not so many men of large fortunein the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.Miss Ward, at the end of half a dozen years, foundherself obliged to be attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris,a friend of her brother-in-law, with scarcely anyprivate fortune, and Miss Frances fared yet worse.Miss Ward's match, indeed, when it came to the point,was not contemptible: Sir Thomas being happily ableto give his friend an income in the living of Mansfield;and Mr. and Mrs. Norris began their career of conjugalfelicity with very little less than a thousand a year.But Miss Frances married, in the common phrase,to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a lieutenantof marines, without education, fortune, or connexions,did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have madea more untoward choice. Sir Thomas Bertram had interest,which, from principle as well as pride from a generalwish of doing right, and a desire of seeing all that wereconnected with him in situations of respectability,he would have been glad to exert for the advantageof Lady Bertram's sister; but her husband's professionwas such as no interest could reach; and before hehad time to devise any other method of assisting them,an absolute breach between the sisters had taken

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction set among the gentry have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature. She was born in Steventon rectory on 16th December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath and then to Chawton in Hampshire. She wrote from a young age and Pride and Prejudice was begun when she was twenty-two years old. It was initially rejected by the publisher she submitted it to and eventually published in 1813 after much revision. All four of her novels - Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815) published in her lifetime were published anonymously. Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (both 1817) were published posthumously.

[Coralie Bickford-Smith's] recent work for Penguin Classics is...nothing short of glorious -- Anna Cole

"Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values."
--Virginia Woolf