Editor's note.

LOOKED AT FROM ONE PERSPECTIVE, Fanny Price is confined to a relatively static existence. Compared to a heroine like Elizabeth Bennet, who travels to London, to Kent, to Derbyshire, and later leaves her home in Hertfordshire for good, Fanny is restricted to a small ambit. Once she arrives at Mansfield Park, she is almost locked into the place. Fanny makes the excursion to Sotherton only as a consequence of Edmund's importunity. When later in the novel she journeys to Portsmouth, that trip is less exploration than exile. During Fanny's years in Northamptonshire, her movements are restricted. She takes short rides, attended by the old coachman; she walks to and from the White house at the behest of Mrs. Norris; she attends church to hear Dr. Grant's "'very good sermons.'" Except on the (probably infrequent) occasions when she accompanies Lady Bertram to dinner at the parsonage, not until Mrs. Grant is moved by the absence of Maria and Julia to invite Fanny to dinner does she dine out on her own. For most of the novel, we see her at Mansfield Park, and much of that time within one of a handful of rooms.

What could be read as limitation, however, can from another perspective be felt as focus, as concentration, as transcendence. Fanny remarks to Miss Crawford that "'especially when I am sitting out of doors, I am very apt to get into this sort of wondering strain'" (my italics). In the East room, in particular, through the aid of her books, her memory, her imagination, Fanny's mind wanders. It's always seemed to me significant that among the transparencies on the windows of the East Room is a representation of Tintern Abbey. Certainly, that ruin was a favorite spot for picturesque travelers, among them Gilpin, J. M. W. Turner, and of course William Wordsworth. Wordsworth's 1798 "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" was the climactic poem of Lyrical Ballads (published in 1798, expanded to two volumes in 1800, and revised again in 1802). It's a poem about landscape and memory, about "what [we] half create, and what perceive," about loss and "abundant recompense," a poem in which the poet finds that compensation not only in nature, in feeling "a motion and a spirit" that "rolls through all things," but in his love for his sister, whom he guides. And it's tempting to imagine that Wordsworth's poem must certainly have been, as Edmund suggests of another text for another reader, "'a favourite'" with Fanny. In Wordsworth's benediction on his sister Dorothy, he looks to a time when her mind "[s]hall be a mansion for all lovely forms, / Thy memory be as a dwelling place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies." This redefinition of spaciousness from the external to the internal landscape suggests the power of Fanny's best self.

I invoke Wordsworth's poem not only because its language and images seem to pervade Mansfield Park but because its particular situation--looking back and looking forward--seems to evoke the moment of this issue of Persuasions. The Jane Austen Society of North America looks back with gratitude on Joan Klingel Ray's six years of invigorating leadership and forward with expectation to what the energies of new president Marsha Huff will inspire. Laurie Kaplan, responsible for the beautiful redesign of Persuasions and editor since 1998, has moved on to other projects though she remains a guiding force behind this journal.

Wordsworth's poem, like Jane Austen's novel, also celebrates relationship, community. Persuasions brings together a community of voices, a community of readers engaged in discovery, connecting through disparate approaches, points of view, perceptions. The first section of this issue selects from the very exciting program put together by Iris Lutz and Bobble Gay for this year's AGM in Tucson: "Fresh Perspectives on Mansfield Park." Essays explore the characters' psychology and family relationships, the music and sounds of Mansfield Park and the meaning of Mary Crawford's harp; some place Mansfield Park in the context of other novels, writers, or genres; still others consider what we can understand about film versions of Austen's novels and what those versions can help us understand about the novels themselves. All the essays are ways of understanding what we might make of Jane Austen's most problematic novel and what we simultaneously come to understand about ourselves as readers.

The Miscellany, a smaller though equally diverse group, ranges from birthdays to bathwater, dancing through the subject of Jane Austen's artistry and engaging her legacy to the novelist Patrick O'Brian.

Throughout this journal we move with Austen and with readers of Austen from the mundane to the sublime, from the external to the internal and back again, gazing together, as Maggie Lane puts it, into the marvels of creation.

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Publication:	Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
Date:	Jan 1, 2006
Words:	787
Previous Article:	Message from the president.
Next Article:	Crawfords on the couch: a psychoanalytical exploration of the effects of the "bad school" on Henry and Mary Crawford.

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