Mansfield Park, Paperback

Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations, Fanny is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, world. But Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the reader alike.

In her Introduction, Carol Shields writes, Mansfield Park's] overriding theme is difficult to isolate, since the novel is about everything it touches upon: nurturing, steadfastness, belonging and not belonging, about fine gradations of moral persuasion, about human noise and silence, and about action and stillness.

Carol Shields is the author of Jane Austen (Penguin Lives), The Stone Diaries, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Larry's Party, Happenstance, and Dressing Up for the Carnival, among other novels. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.