Mansfield Park has been described by a leading literary critic as “one of the most profound novels of the nineteenth century”. As the title suggests, it is the story of a house, Mansfield Park , and the people who come and go and carry on their intrigues and affairs in and around it. Mansfield Park centres on the development of its heroine Fanny Price from a timid, passive girl to a mature and self-knowing woman. Fanny is ‘inwardly’ shaped by the house which is the symbol of a cultivated, harmonious way of life. The most dramatic exterior happenings are those that disturb that way of life.