Anghraine

After I said (for the unpopular opinion meme) that I think Mansfield Park is her best novel in terms of vision and execution, mairesmith on Tumblr replied:

Mansfield Park has fabulous vision, but the execution suffers in having one-dimensional characters mixing with more fully realised ones. Fanny’s cousins are just not fleshed out enough to make the plot of the end of the novel work. I hesitate to suggest it needed to be longer, but maybe if she’d had more room to show Maria, Julia, and Edwards’ actions in more detail, we’d have had reasons for their relationship decisions beyond keeping Fanny from Mr Crawford.

I said:

Obviously, I completely disagree.

I don’t think of MP as a love-story, to be sure, but IMO Tom, Maria, and Julia are as realized as fairly minor characters need to be (I think the girls in particular are more authentically written than say Lucy Steele or Isabella Thorpe). I find Edmund quite complex—his combination of real virtues and very significant flaws is what makes him so difficult as a character, and I find that interesting (not always likable, but interesting).

Also, I don’t think any of the other books’ rival characters are even slightly comparable to Mary Crawford, and Henry is the most nuanced of the rakes by a mile. Sir Thomas, too, is interestingly difficult. That’s the book in a nutshell for me, and I wholeheartedly respect it for that.