Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

I have been reading Mansfield Park and it is so delightful. It has given me more pleasure than anything else in my past weeks. Fanny Price is the character I should have written for my Dora - half caricature, but so well developed and so convincing in her emotions that I do not know if I want her feelings, or Edmund's, to prevail. She is the only Austen heroine we meet as a child, and it is easier to form an attachment to a younger heroine. I can hear her, as I can hear Mary Crawford's banter off the pages - though I do wonder at how the people of the Regency amused themselves, pacing idly about drawing rooms hours on end, and how Jane Austen is so decided in her judgement of characters as "ill" or "selfish." Is there no room for redemption, do people never change?

I finished it in a sitting, thrilled that every time I turned the page the story had not ended yet. My only regret is that the denouement happened too quickly. I would like to know "just when, and not a week earlier or later" Edmund finally made his professions of love to Fanny.