Murder at Mansfield Park [Formato Kindle]

MANSFIELD PARK is considered (by some) to be the dark horse of Jane Austen's oeuvre and her heroine Fanny Price intolerable. Poor Fanny. She really gets the bum's rush in Austenland. The patron saint of the weak, insipid and downtrodden, she is Jane Austen's most misunderstood heroine. In fact, many dispute if she is the heroine of MANSFIELD PARK at all, giving that honor to the evil antagonist Mary Crawford.

Much has been debated over why Austen's dark and moralistic novel has not been embraced as warmly as its sparkling siblings. Personally, I delight in reading MANSFIELD PARK and root for Fanny Price's principles to prevail. So when I read a book announcement last July that Jane Austen's classic would be re-imagined as a murder mystery "whereas Fanny is quite a pain in the arse in Austen's version, Lynn's [Shepherd] Fanny is an outrageous gold-digger", my rankles were ired. First it was zombies in my Austen, then vampires and now my gentle Fanny was under attack. What next?

Reading MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK with a chip on my shoulder made for a difficult beginning. I was resistant and confused by all the character changes. Shepherd mixes up Austen's classic story by switching the protagonist and antagonist, morphing other characters and plot points and spotlighting the murder instead of the moralistic undertones that Austen chose to soft shoe her narrative. This was Austen's setting but in an alternate universe. Meek, poor and principled Fanny Price was egotistical, rich and underhanded. Selfish, coquettish and manipulative Mary Crawford was generous, demure and obliging. Edmund was no longer a Bertram but the son of Rev & Mrs. Norris, now rich gentry. Henry Crawford was no longer an estate owner but a renovator of estates. There were the familiar private theatricals, the gift necklace and ball, the excursion to view a picturesque estate, and the elopement, but all tweaked and scrambled. There are other changes, but you get my drift. If MANSFIELD PARK nay sayers wanted a complete renovation, this was it. The only constant between both novels was the officious and abrasive Mrs. Norris. Obviously Shepherd knew a good/bad thing when she saw it, and let her be.

I was immediately charmed by Shepherd's command of Regency-era language. Not since Diana Birchall's MRS. DARCY'S DILEMMA have we been treated to such effusions of fanciful Austenesque styling. As the prose eloquently rolled through the first few chapters I set aside my resistance to change and began to appreciate the craft behind the concept of turning everything we knew about Austen's characters and plot completely asunder. This was a pastiche written with great respect for the original by an author who understood the novel as it was evolving during the early nineteenth-century and had a superior command of the language.

When the insulting and underhanded Fanny Price is finally bumped off half way through the book, few will grieve and many will cheer. She had now become Shepherd's Fanny and not Austen's, so it is all forgivable. Enter thief-taker Charles Maddox hired by Tom Bertram to sleuth out the criminal and the novel becomes a murder mystery. Since I have a penchant for handsome and clever gumshoes who swoop in and put the world to right, it was an easy step to acquiescence. Shepherd had achieved the impossible by renovating Jane and totally charming me in the process. Her characterization of Henry Crawford proclaimed that it was his "role is to improve upon nature, to supply her deficiencies, and create the prefect prospect that should have been the imperfect one that is." I will argue that Lynn Shepherd has accomplished just the same.

Laurel Ann, Austenprose

I love Mansfield Park, and I love murder mysteries. Ms. Shepherd has a Ph.D. in English literature from Oxford, and it shows. Her command of the vocabulary of the Austen era is pitch-perfect. She also scatters learned references throughout, lifting entire sentences and paragraphs not just from MP but from the other novels, as well as from the letters and from Austen biography. "The heat keeps one in a continual state of inelegance," one character remarks in a line straight from a letter. "Indeed, she is quite the vainest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly I have ever had the misfortune to encounter," Mrs. Norris says of Mary Crawford, a remark in real life supposedly made about Jane Austen as a young woman by the mother of Mary Russell Mitford (though whether she actually knew her, or just later claimed to have, is open to some doubt).

The characters in Ms. Shepherd's alternative Mansfield Park are jumbled like dice in a box. Most notably, Fanny Price, still a cousin of the Betrams, is now orphaned, fabulously rich, and insufferable. Mary Crawford is poor and worthy. Henry Crawford is a renovator of estates, rather like Repton. Julia Betram is sensitive and romantic and neglected, and vaguely like the two younger Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility. Edmund, for some reason, is now the stepson of Mrs. Norris, who is much like the original Mrs. Norris, except richer and more obnoxious; he seems to have cross-pollinated with Edward Ferrars from Sense and Sensbility. Maria Betram is rather like herself, and so is Tom Betram. Mr. Rushworth is still rich but no longer stupid; he is more like Robert Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility.

I fancy I know Mansfield Park as well as the next person, having reread it only two months ago, but I found initially myself getting confused between the elements that overlap and those that don't. In the first half of the book many of the same scenes and elements crop up: an outing to view an estate, an aborted production of Lover's Vows, a necklace, a ball, a game of Speculation, Sir Thomas Betram's departure (he merely goes to Yorkshire, not Antigua), the departure of a beloved brother to sea (This time it's Julia who pines for him, not Fanny).

Incident rapidly succeeds incident, but at first I could not seem to answer the essential questions. Why has the author changed some things so utterly and left others the same? Where was she going with this?

Certainly Mansfield Park is the novel that Jane Austen fans find the most vexing: the way the people we feel we are supposed to admire (Fanny and Edmund) are so much harder to like than the supposed villains of the piece (Mary and Henry Crawford). Certainly there is a large body of readers who think the main characters married the wrong people, and that a Henry-Fanny and Edmund-Mary match-up would have been a more satisfying result. I do not share these views, but I do understand them. Was this the author's intent, to at once construct a homage to Mansfield Park and a more satisfying end to it, through the device of murder mysteries and alternate endings?

The book has 363 pages in the edition I am reading, and the body is discovered on page 158. Once a murder has been discovered, the book takes on a kind of energy it seemed to lack before. Or maybe it is not the book that underwent a shift, but the reader. For the things that were troubling me about the book up to that point -- how it both was and was not like Mansfield Park, the abrupt shifts in points of view and tone, the moments of foreshadowing that did not seem to fit, my puzzlement about the author's aim -- all seemed to fall away. Suddenly, everything made perfect sense, for I found myself in the familiar, forgiving world of an English country house murder mystery, and I understood exactly what the author was doing. And thought she did it very well. The detective, Charles Maddox, is perfect. Mary Crawford, once she steps out of the shadow of the other Mary Crawford, becomes an engaging and sympathetic character. The mystery plot is taut and engrossing; the language never gets in the way.

And could I have not figured this out before? The title of the book after all, contains the word "Murder." There is an image of a corpse on the cover; a tasteful image, to be sure, but still. A person might be forgiven for thinking I was a bit slow on the uptake. The only thing I can say in my defense: there was so much of Jane Austen here, I got confused. I was thinking the author was trying to do something else -- what? I was not certain. Construct an alternate Mansfield Park, somewhat the way the wonderfully strange Wide Sargasso Sea constructs an alternate Jane Eyre?

It's a good deal easier, and probably more pleasing to readers, to write a good murder mystery than the Mansfield Park answer to Wide Sargasso Sea, and I am happy that this in the end is what Lynn Shepherd did. It is a lesson in how truly elastic the murder mystery is as a form, despite its seemingly ironclad requirements.

SPOILER ALERT!!! And in this retelling, I really did think the heroine picked the wrong person! I was hoping Mary Crawford would marry Mr. Maddox and travel around England solving crimes with him. I think this could be the basis for a very promising series. Perhaps in Lynn Shepherd's next book, he can end up with another overlooked Austen heroine. Charlotte Collins, anyone (after the convenient death of her first husband)?

Like everyone else who has ever read Mansfield Park, I strongly dislike Fanny Price. She was a weak, pathetic main character that you just couldn't want good things for. When I heard about Murder at Mansfield Park, I immediately thought this was exactly what the original needed. When I learned that Fanny was to be the murder victim, I was sold.

Unfortunately, the author decided to not only kill Fanny off, but to change her entire demeanor. While I believe Fanny was strongly in need of a personality adjustment, Shepherd did a complete 180 with the character and made her a strong-willed, mean spirited wench. Once again, you wanted bad things to happen to her. This time they did, but since she was such an awful person, it was hard to care who killed her.

The first half of the book dragged. The writing was vaguely reminiscent of Jane Austen, but it lacked the deep snarky humor Austen weaved into all of her works. Once Fanny is murdered and the professional investigator arrived, the story started moving, but remained dry.

The one major huge thing Murder at Mansfield Park has going for it is its mystery. It was crafted well, with many convincing suspects and motives. Fanny's killer was impossible to figure out because everyone had the means, motive and opportunity.

If read as an original historical mystery, Murder at Mansfield Park is an interesting, if not exactly thrilling experience. Those who've read Mansfield Park will find it near impossible to not compare the two and find that Murder at Mansfield Park while different, lacks Austen's flair.