This document provides instructions and background information for an exercise adapting a scene from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to a modern setting. It begins by reviewing the previous week's adaptation exercise. It then instructs students to take the scene they chose and rewrite it using updated character details, a contemporary setting, and cultural references. The document provides context about Mansfield Park, discussing its publication, reviews, and themes. It outlines film adaptations and compares the novel to Austen's other works. Finally, it previews the next class.

1. MANSFIELD PARK
BUT FIRST…OUR EXERCISE

2. FROM LAST WEEK
• Last week, you:
• Chose a chapter from either Pride and Prejudice or Eligible and wrote down the
architecture of that scene, i.e. the plot points
• Then you updated the characters with contemporary professions/lives
• You chose a setting
• You considered the themes of the story and wrote notes about the larger rules of
your life and how they impact you as an individual
• Finally, you jotted down some signposts from contemporary culture (think CrossFit
in Eligible)

3. FINAL ADAPTATION EXERCISE: 30
MINUTES
WE ARE READING THESE AFTERWARD.
• Return to that first exercise, the sketch or architecture of the chapter you chose.
• Now, using the character elements you wrote out, your setting, your time-specific
cultural artifacts and your thematic motivation, write out that scene as thoroughly as
you can.
• Characters: Visual description and dialogue
• Action: Have something happen (what the architecture of the chapter prescribes)
• Put your own spin on it with the other details you’ve already generated.
• Give yourself a working title
• Have some fun!

4. ADAPTATION: THE GOAL
• The goals in any adaptive work can be varied, but here are some of the main ones:
• To find a new lens to consider canonical work
• To create original work that is in conversation with other writers/literary artifacts
• To interrogate questions/ spaces in the original work in ways that evolves the issues
that are at play
• To have a good time writing
• Because as writers, any type of constraint is a good mental exercise (remember the
OuliPo)

5. MANSFIELD PARK, THE TICK
TOCK
• Austen’s third published novel: 1814, She wrote it after
Pride and Prejudice—took a little more than a year and
a half, according to letters written by her sister.
• She was in her late 30s, so it’s the first novel she wrote
as an adult.
• That maturity is perhaps reflected in the darker themes
and greater character complexity compared to the first
two books.

6. MANSFIELD PARK, THE TICK
TOCK
• Austen herself said it was “not half so entertaining” as Pride
and Prejudice (cit: JASNA.org), although she said it with pride
because she was proud of Mansfield Park.
• The first work she wrote after moving to Chawton in 1809. Her
father had died five years before and her brother Frank offers
this as a place for the Austen women to live permanently so
they can stop moving around. Austen is 32.
• Was not reviewed by critics at the time, but she solicited
reviews from her family and friends and made a list titled
“Opinions of Mansfield Park”

7. THOSE OPINIONS
• Mr. Egerton, the publisher of the first edition, “praised it
for its Morality, & for being so equal a Composition.—
No weak parts.”
• Cassandra Austen “thought it quite as clever, tho’ not so
brilliant, as P. & P.—Fond of Fanny.—Delighted much in
Mr. Rushworth’s stupidity.”
• Others, like her niece Anna Lefroy, “liked it better than
P. & P.—but not so well as S. & S.—could not bear
Fanny.—Delighted with Mrs. Norris.”

8. THOSE OPINIONS
• And still others, such as Mrs. Carrick, felt that
• “All who think deeply & feel much will give the
Preference to Mansfield Park.”
• Cit: Ibid,
http://www.jasna.org/austen/works/mansfield-park
• Manuscript image:
https://janeausteninvermont.blog/2014/05/02

9. BACKGROUND AND CONTROVERSIES
• Written while Austen was revising Pride and Prejudice.
• Publication history is complicated; original manuscript not available;
two different versions. First edition had controversial number of typos.
• Unanswered questions about why it took longer than the other two to
write and a 9-month delay in getting it to publication.
• The novel was first published by Thomas Egerton. A second edition was
published in 1816 by John Murray, still within Austen's lifetime. The
novel did not receive any critical attention when it was initially
published. Later scholarly editions have had to choose between which
edition to use—no original Austen manuscripts still exist (exist for Lady
Susan)
• Sales were terrible. The editor of the 2005 edition compared the book
itself to Fanny Price: “compares this to the treatment of Fanny Price
in the tale: “neglected, passed over, misunderstood, sneered at and
ill-used”

10. MODERN CRITICS: CONTROVERSIAL
OF THE NOVELS
• Fanny Price, hard to love? What is a heroine?
• Less aspirational and more realistic than Austen’s other novels: the Prices are from a
lower level of society than most Austen characters; supporters argue it’s a novel that
champions meritocracy.
• Some critics reading through a post-colonial lens deride the novel because Austen
is not more explicit in condemning slave labor, which makes Mansfield Park, the
place, possible. Others say the mere fact that it’s in there, given that Austen doesn’t
write about social issues, was her way of exerting her own views.
• Fanny Price questions her uncle about slavery, despite her timidity. And in her letters
to her sister, Austen mentions an author sho was a well known abolitionist with love.
Her favorite poet, William Cowper, was an abolitionist who wrote anti-slavery
poems.

11. MANSFIELD PARK
• Lord Mansfield was a well known justice who presided over a case well known at the
time, concerning James Somerset, a slave who was brought to England from
Jamaica by his American “master.” He escaped, was recaptured and put on a ship to
Jamaica to be sold. Granville Sharp, a lawyer, takes the case and argues that
Somerset is a free man. The laws are confusing and the case drags on, but
eventually Mansfield frees Somerset:
• “The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on
any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force
long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is
erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but
positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I
cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the
black must be discharged.”

12. FILM ADAPTATIONS
• Probably the most interesting is Whit Stillman’s
Metropolitan (1990, nominated for Best Original
Screenplay
• Not a direct adaptation, more an homage; it’s about Ivy
League young people in New York. Metropolitan was
Stillman’s first movie. He recently made Love &
Friendship, based on Austen’s unfinished novella Lady
Susan. He then actually wrote a book called Love &
Friendship afterward.
• 1999 a more straightforward version by Teresa Rozema,
which also uses Austen’s letters
• 2007 version, Iain B. MacDonald, universally panned as
being possibly the worst Austen adaptation

13. THAT LIONEL TRILLING REFERENCE
• Highly cited essay by Lionel Trilling (short story writer, critic), called Mansfield Park.
• “Sooner or later when we speak of Jane Austen, we speak of irony, and it is better to
speak of it sooner rather than later because nothing can so far mislead us about her
work as a wrong understanding of this one aspect of it.”
• —Trilling, The Opposing Self, 1955)

14. SIMILARITIES/DIFFERENCES
• Class structure/social mobility
• Money
• Land and landscape
• Marriage as the only means for women due to primogeniture
• But unlike the first two novels that end with marriages, here we see the aftermath: the novel
begins by introducing the marriage of Lady Bertram and Sir Thomas
• The novel also branches into new territory, such as “ordination” in the Edmund storyline.
Austen wrote to her sister after P & P was published and said, “Now I will try to write of
something else, & it shall be a complete change of subject—ordination.” Scholars have
debated for a very long time what Austen might have meant by that and what ordination’s
meaning is in the book.

15. THEATER AND ACTING
• Chapters 13-20 revolve around the production of ”Lovers Vows,” a play by Elizabeth
Inchbald, first performed in 1798
• What might theater as a concept represent; what does it mean to act?
• Austen and her family often read and put on private plays at home, so she had
participated in them and was a fan.
• Why do you think Austen depicts Fanny as refusing to participate in the play? What
are her and Edmund’s objections?
• Three-volumes of the book is a structural echo of a three-act play.

16. KYLIE’S PRESENTATION

17. NEXT WEEK
• Finish Mansfield Park
• In-class closed-book midterm reading essay on everything we’ve read so far, books
and supplemental material
• You will find all class presentations on the website to review
• There won’t be trick questions or dates on the quiz; this is about reading and
comprehension
• Also next week: Brantlee’s Mansfield Park presentation