This novel, originally published in 1814, is the first of Jane Austen's novels not to be a revised version of one of her pre-1800 writings. Mansfield Park has sometimes been considered atypical of Jane Austen, as being solemn and moralistic, especially when contrasted with the immediately preceding Pride and Prejudice and the immediately following Emma. Poor Fanny Price is brought up at Mansfield Park with her rich uncle and aunt, where only her cousin Edmund helps her with the difficulties she suffers from the rest of the family, and from her own fearfulness and timidity. When the sophisticated Crawfords (Henry and Mary), visit the Mansfield neighbourhood, the moral sense of each marriageable member of the Mansfield family is tested in various ways, by Fanny emerges more or less unscathed. The well-ordered (if somewhat vacuous) house at Mansfield Park, and its country setting, play an important role in the novel, and are contrasted with the squalor of Fanny's own birth family's home at Portsmouth, and with the decadence of London.

Readers have a wide variety of reactions to Mansfield Park--most of which already appear in the Opinions of Mansfield Park collected by Jane Austen herself soon after the novel's publication. Some dislike the character of Fanny as "priggish" (however, it is Edmund who sets the moral tone here), or have no sympathy for her forced inaction (doubtless, those are people who have never lacked confidence, or been without a date on Friday night!). Mansfield Park has also been used to draw connections between the "genteel" rural English society that Jane Austen describes and the outside world, since Fanny's uncle is a Slave-owner (with an state in Antigua in the Caribbean; slavery was not abolished in the British empire until 1833). Like a number of other topics, Jane Austen only chose to allude glancingly to the slavery in her novels, though she was aware of contemporary debates on the subject. Mansfield Park was one of only two of Jane Austen's novels to be revised by her after its first publication, when a second edition came out in 1816 (this second was a failure in terms of sales).

After that, we offer some notes on some customs of the society of Jane Austen's day, which are part of the background to Mansfield Park, but which may not be intuitively obvious to modern readers:

1. Henry Crawford, as a young unrelated unmarried member of the opposite sex, is not entitled to give any personal gifts to Fanny Price. In allowing herself to be used as the conduit through which the necklace is given, Mary Crawford is committing a violation of etiquette or protocol --and in doing this without Fanny Price's knowledge or consent, Mary Crawford is not acting with much discretion or kidness toward Fanny. (Chapter 26: "Miss Crawford, complaisant as a sister, was careless as a woman and a friend"; Chapter 36: "Do you mean, then, that your brother knew of the necklace beforehand? Oh! Miss Crawford, that was not fair.")
2. Similarly, Henry Crawford and Fanny Price are not entitled to correspond with each other, nor are Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford. When Mary Crawford insists upon corresponding with Fanny Price, in order to use this correspondence to get around such restrictions, she isn't showing excessive delicacy or consideration for Fanny here either.

Jane Austen considered this novel as a try to make a kind or more serious novels, but, sometimes, that serious spirit become a sententious tone against her thoughts about the amateur theatre and the behaviour of Mary Crawford.

Fanny Price is not in line to become the new Lady Bertram at the end of Mansfield Park, despite what some noted critics have said, unless there is some new unforseen occurrence that bumps off Tom Bertram: --towards the end of the novel, Tom is recovering from his illness (and still marriageable), and Edmund and Fanny's move to Mansfield Parsonage a few years after their marriage (as reported in the last paragraph of the novel) probably indicates that Tom is then still alive.