Spoilers ahead for Mansfield Park.

I’ve (clearly) been increasingly obsessed with Jane Austen lately. I’m nearly finished with Mansfield Park and if things go well today, I will finish it this afternoon. I wasn’t thrilled with it the first time I read it about eight or nine years ago. That’s why I only read it once. But now, having grown up some and read more widely across different types of literature, I understand more the social and religious implications of the novel. Because of that, I’ve found that I have grown to love it as much as Emma and Northanger Abbey. I might even love it more than Emma, though that’s hard for me to say because they’re very different novels. I think Mansfield Park is probably one of the most serious of Austen’s novels, right along with Sense and Sensibility. It’s not that the others aren’t serious, just that they carry more explicit humor than Mansfield Park.

Fanny Price has become one of my favorite of Austen’s heroines. She’s compassionate and loving, devoted and honest, intelligent and clever, and she feels things much more deeply than she shows (which I can relate to). One of the things I love most about this novel is that one of it’s core themes is the difference between devotion and determination. Fanny loves her cousin Edmund throughout the whole novel, even as he’s falling in love with a different woman. And Henry, the brother to the woman Edmund loves, falls in love with Fanny, proposes to her, and even after she rejects him, is determined to persevere. His determination is portrayed by Fanny’s relations as devotion, as the purest sort of love, though Fanny can’t love him back because she’s already in love with Edmund.

And here’s the difference: Henry is in love with Fanny and continues to pursue her even after she refuses his initial proposal. And while some of his behavior does seem to be truly motivated by affection for her, it’s impossible to forget that his initial intention was to make Fanny fall in love with him, and this before he had any feelings for her at all. She was the only young woman who doesn’t fawn all over him and that smacks his pride down too low, so of course he has to remedy the situation. And as a result, he ends up falling in love with her. And yes, he does some truly wonderful things for her to prove his love, but the biggest thing he could do (acknowledge that she doesn’t love him and doesn’t want to marry him), he refuses to do. He isn’t devoted to Fanny, he’s determined to win against her very real desires. It implies that she doesn’t know what she wants and it causes her a great deal of pain to see him carry on as he does.

Contrarywise, Fanny is in love with Edmund even though he’s pursuing someone else, but Fanny never tells him her feelings (at least not up to where I am in the novel). She loves him, but without any expectations of him returning that love. Her love is not possessive. She wants him to be happy, even if it means that he chooses a woman who doesn’t at all deserve him. And while she is brokenhearted that he doesn’t return her affections, she doesn’t see this as a situation that she needs to change. She understands, even if she doesn’t say it explicitly, that love cannot be forced. It must be something that happens naturally. And so she resigns herself to loving Edmund for the rest of her life, even if it means he never returns that level of affection.

I’m not saying determination in love is always bad, but under these particular circumstances, it is. People act like Fanny has a duty to accept Henry’s proposal because it would elevate her and her family, she would live a very comfortable life with a man who has more money than someone of her inconsequence could hope to catch, and he’s done her brother a great deal of service by getting him promoted to the rank of Lieutenant. No one considers how much of a flirt he is, how improperly he has behaved at various times, how self motivated and self-centered he is in everything, nor how inconstant he is. Everyone assumes that because he has fallen in love with Fanny (a woman no one thought anyone would fall in love with), his love can only be of the truest, deepest, kind. No one considers that he might, as so many other men have done with their wives, quickly fall out of love with her, even should they marry, and then what? He has proven himself to be a horrible flirt and no one but Fanny is sensible enough to acknowledge this.

What have I learned from this? Well, that I love Mansfield Park so much more this time than I did the first; that I think Jane Austen one of the most honest writers of love in the English language, that I intend to reread all of her novels in the next several months, and that I genuinely want to become an Austen scholar, if such an opportunity exists. I feel she is wildly overrated, even for as popular as she is, and I don’t think she is given nearly enough attention in literature classes. (Neither are the Brontes for that matter, but I digress.) Her novels are still incredibly relevant on the subjects of what love is, what consent is, on toxic masculinity, on classism, on the evils of the uber wealthy, and on sexism. It’s astonishing at times to think of how relevant her novels are to even today’s society, and yet they are.

Next, I’ll be reading Persuasion. I’m not sure what after that, but I am thrilled by this endeavor. Jane Austen soothes my soul. If I were to recommend any author to someone suffering a broken heart, it would be Jane Austen.