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Addressing readerly unease: discovering the gothic in Mansfield Park.

From: Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal  |  Date: 1/1/2006  |  Author: Hall, Lynda A.

READERS ARE OFTEN UNCOMFORTABLE WITH Mansfield Park because Fanny Price is meek, self-deprecating, pious, sickly, and self-righteous. For Thomas Hoberg, Fanny Price is "the passive Cinderella" who "is not like her canonical sisters and that's the whole problem" (137), while Amy J. Pawl speculates that Fanny's affinity to the eighteenth-century sentimental heroine makes her a "problem," because Austen "attempts to take some forms of sentimentalism seriously" (288). Many readers are ...

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