The novel tells the story of Fanny Price, starting when her overburdened family sends her at the age of ten to live in the household of her wealthy aunt and uncle and following her development into early adulthood.

After Tom returns to Mansfield Park ahead of his father, he encourages the young people to begin rehearsals for an amateur performance of Elizabeth Inchbald's play Lovers' Vows.

Edmund objects, believing Sir Thomas would disapprove and feeling that the subject matter is inappropriate but, after much pressure, he agrees to take on the role of the lover of the character played by Mary.

To help Fanny appreciate Henry's offer, Sir Thomas sends her to visit her parents in Portsmouth, where she is taken aback by the contrast between their chaotic household and the harmonious environment at Mansfield.

[11]In 2014, celebrating the passing of 200 years since the novel's publication, Paula Byrne wrote: "Ignore its uptight reputation, Mansfield Park ... seethes with sex and explores England's murkiest corners".

[15] Apart from a day's visit to Sotherton and three months' confinement in Portsmouth, the novel's action is restricted to a single estate, yet its subtle allusions are global, touching on India, China and the Caribbean.

[27] Austen biographer Claire Tomalin (1997) argues that Fanny rises to her moment of heroism when she rejects the obedience that, as a woman, she has been schooled to accept and follows the higher dictate of her own conscience.

Kirkham sees Mansfield Park as an attack on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's popular 1762 work, Emile, or On Education, which depicted the ideal woman as fragile, submissive, and physically weaker than men.

Rousseau stated: "So far from being ashamed of their weakness, they glory in it; their tender muscles make no resistance; they affect to be incapable of lifting the smallest burdens, and would blush to be thought robust and strong.

He draws attention to C. S. Lewis's observation that "into Fanny, Jane Austen, to counterbalance her apparent insignificance, has put really nothing except rectitude of mind, neither passion, nor physical courage, nor wit, nor resource".

Canadian scholar David Monaghan draws attention to the rural way of life which, with its careful respect for the order and rhythm of times and seasons, reinforces and reflects the values of "elegance, propriety, regularity, harmony".

Leigh, who had already employed Repton at Adlestrop, now commissioned him to make improvements at Stoneleigh where he redirected the River Avon, flooded a section of the land to create a mirror lake, and added a bowling green lawn and cricket pitch.

Colleen Sheehan compares the scenario to the Eden of Milton's Paradise Lost, where the locked iron gates open onto a deep gulf separating Hell and Heaven.

Harris says that, whereas in Pride and Prejudice Austen shows how theatricality masks and deceives in daily life, in Mansfield Park "she interrogates more deeply the whole remarkable phenomenon of plays and play-acting".

[77] Returning unexpectedly from his plantations in Antigua, Sir Thomas Bertram discovers the young people rehearsing a production of Elizabeth Inchbald's Lovers' Vows (adapted from the German August von Kotzebue).

Fanny Price is astonished that the play was ever thought appropriate, and considers the two leading female roles as "totally improper for home representation—the situation of one, and the language of the other so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty".

[82] Many elements observed by the young Austen during family theatricals are reworked in the novel, including the temptation of James, her recently ordained brother, by their flirtatious cousin Eliza.

"[102] Trilling believed Austen was making ordination the subject of Mansfield Park; Byrne argues (as do others) that although this is based on a misreading of the letter, "there is no doubt that Edmund's vocation is at the centre of the novel".

On the basis of close observations of her brother-in-law, Dr Grant, Mary arrives at the jaundiced conclusion that a "clergyman has nothing to do, but be slovenly and selfish, read the newspaper, watch the weather and quarrel with his wife.

Mary in her angry response to Edmund as he finally leaves her, declares: "At this rate, you will soon reform every body at Mansfield and Thornton Lacey; and when I hear of you next, it may be as a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists, or as a missionary in foreign parts."

"Sir Thomas conveniently overlooks his earlier plan, before he was forced to sell the Mansfield living to pay off Tom's debts, that Edmund should draw the income from both parishes.

[114] Although not explicitly stated in the novel, allusions are made to the fact that Sir Thomas Bertram's home, the titular Mansfield Park, is built on the proceeds of his slave plantation in Antigua.

[117] Austen's favourite poet, the Evangelical William Cowper, was also a passionate abolitionist who often wrote poems on the subject, notably his famous work The Task, also favoured by Fanny Price.

[120] Paradoxically, Said acknowledged that Austen disapproved of slavery: All the evidence says that even the most routine aspects of holding slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation were cruel stuff.

Fanny Price reminds her cousin that after asking Sir Thomas about the slave trade, "there was such a dead silence" as to suggest that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both.

Rozema invented numerous scenes not present in the book, including one where Fanny is travelling to the Bertram estate and hears the cries from Africans on board a slave ship off the coast.

[88] Early in the novel when Sir Thomas leaves for Antigua, Maria and Julia sigh with relief, released from their father's demands for propriety, even though they have no particular rebellion in mind.

The privacy of Mansfield Park, intensely important to Sir Thomas, comes under threat during the theatricals and is dramatically destroyed following the national exposure of Maria's adultery.

The shallowness of Henry Crawford's feelings is finally exposed when, having promised to take care of Fanny's welfare, he is distracted by Mary's ploy to renew his contact in London with the newly married Maria.

Lane offers a more sympathetic interpretation: "We applaud Jane Austen for showing us a flawed man morally improving, struggling, growing, reaching for better things—even if he ultimately fails.