Mansfield Park Revisited

Joan Aiken is a very fine writer. Best known, and certainly best known to me, as an author of children's books, she also wrote several Jane Austen sequels. I read her continuation of JA's unfinished novel The Watsons earlier this year and have just finished this one. I've read rather a lot of sequels recently, ranging from dreadful through acceptable to excellent, and I'd put this one into the third category, though I did have some quibbles about the ending. 

Just before the novel begins  -- about four years after the end of Mansfield Park -- Sir Thomas Bertram has died. Someone is needed to settle business at the estates in the West Indies, and Lady Bertram is unwilling to let her older son Tom, now the new Sir Thomas, to go, as she fears he might have a return of the fever that threatened his life some years earlier. Edmund is more than willing to go, and Fanny -- who never actually appears in the narrative -- insists on accompanying him, taking their newborn baby along. Their older child, three-year-old Mary, is to be left in the care of Fanny's younger sister Susan Price, now living at Mansfield and taking Fanny's place as Lady Bertram's companion and carer. It is Susan, now eighteen and an intelligent, good-hearted, though sometimes rather outspoken girl, around whom the plot revolves. Soon after Edmund and Fanny's departure, Susan is faced with a considerable challenge. New tenants have arrived at The White House in the village, the one-time residence of Mrs Norris (who, we learn, has also recently died at the house in Keswick where she was living with the divorced and disgraced Maria Bertram). Those tenants turn out to be none other than Mary Crawford and her brother Henry. Susan is in some distress at this news, knowing that Tom has no time for the Crawfords, as he holds them to be to blame for Maria's bad behaviour. But when she discovers that Mary is gravely, probably fatally, ill, Susan starts to visit her and a genuine friendship develops between them. Mary is a chastened woman with an unhappy marriage behind her, and what she tells Susan about the truth of Maria's relationship with Henry is startling, to say the least. When Susan actually meets Henry, an instant rapport develops between them. Tom, meanwhile, is feeling ready to settle down, and has his eye on a wealthy and charming girl from a neighbouring village. She, however, shows signs of preferring Susan's brother William, now a Captain in the navy...

I can't even begin to enjoy a JA sequel unless the language is right, and Aiken scores top marks for this -- I couldn't fault her once. Her characterisation is also astonishingly right. Lady Bertram, Tom and Mary Crawford are exactly as we remember them -- I was particularly impressed with Mary, who speaks and acts exactly as she did in JA's novel, or rather as she would have done had she been in pain and seriously ill. Julia Bertram, now Mrs Yates, has developed into a horrendous carbon copy of her Aunt Norris, and treats Susan as badly as Mrs Norris did Fanny. And the new characters, invented by Aiken for the novel, are absolutely convincing. I particularly liked Mrs Osborne, sister of the vicar who has come to replace Edmund during the West Indian trip. The widow of an Admiral (unfortunately washed overboard on a sea voyage) she is warm, intelligent and delightfully relaxed. As for Susan, I thought she was great. No shrinking violet, she has had to learn to moderate her natural ebullience and her tendency to speak her mind, but she is a true Austen heroine in her natural sense of right and wrong. But, as I said at the beginning, I was not totally happy with the ending. It seemed to me almost as if Aiken had scrambled through to a conclusion in a bit of a hurry, and I was disappointed by the choice Susan eventually made, which I thought had not really been prepared for in any convincing way. But others might disagree. All in all, I had enormous pleasure in reading this, and wished it had been longer.

Comments

[lindsay bagshaw]

Your comments on the hurried, under-prepared ending of Aiken's novel are well targeted, and I agree. But - lese-majeste warning - they are rather typical of Jane herself, n'est pas? But Aiken overdoes it, and her ending was a bit lazy, a parallel MP with the second sister.