The writer and blogger Sarah Emsley is two months into “An Invitation to Mansfield Park,” her year-long series of weekly guest posts celebrating the novel’s bicentennial. My contribution goes up tomorrow: I’ll be talking about the famous episode in Chapter 10 when Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford slip through the gate at Sotherton together.
The series so far has been a fascinating and eclectic mix of responses to selected passages in the novel -- a bracingly democratic embrace of all kinds of Jane Austen fans. Along with a number of literary critics parsing Austen’s words and setting her work in historical context, we’ve heard from a medical doctor discussing the gluttony of Dr. Grant and a minister’s wife responding to Mary Crawford’s disdain for the clergy.
In the weeks ahead, dozens more guest posters – among them, bloggers, scholars, journalists, and authors of Austen spinoff fiction – will weigh in. I encourage you to drop by (and not just tomorrow).
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