Mansfield Miscellany Mashup (07/09/23)
Constancy, Discoveries, and a Break
Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary. But THIS time, I’m combining it with the weekly Year of Jane (Austen) email…
East, West, Home’s Best
We had a fantastic time visiting family in the crisp mountains of Appalachia and now we’re home with Florida humidity and heat. Despite the misery of the summer climate, it’s good to be home and live oak trees and Spanish moss are filling my soul with joy.
But all the travel following by work, unpacking, and laundry catch up has meant not a lot of margin to write our last Mansfield Park reflection. So I’ll do a quick wrap up here!
Mansfield Park and the Virtue of Constancy
The comments on all of the MP posts have been my favorite so far in this Year of Jane. I love reading your insights and I’ve definitely learned a lot from you all when reading MP! (Here’s the most recent reflection with some great reader comments.)
Writing the Mansfield Park chapter of my book, Jane Austen’s Genius Guide to Life, was an incredible experience because I had to learn about the virtue of constancy in order to write it. Constancy isn’t a concept I really understood until diving in to try to understand what exactly made Fanny Price so extraordinary and what prevented Edmund (and Mary and Henry and everyone else) from being capable of being on her level.
This talk by philosopher (and third party presidential candidate) Cornel West was key in my understanding of Austen and virtue, so give it a listen if you want to get really pumped up about Austen, literature, and the power of story in forming virtue:
Power and Freedom in Jane Austen’s Novels—a talk by Dr. Cornel West for JASNA
Dr. West claims that in Austen, constancy is what strives to push against, “all of those forces that somehow try to shatter the self.”
In my book, I also draw on Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and he describes constancy as presented by Austen as “a prerequisite for the possession of other virtues.”
Fanny is true to herself in the most important way: she does not allow outside forces to cause her to buckle and behave in a way she believes to be wrong. Everyone else in the novel can be virtuous only up to a point. Henry falls when temptation arises. Edmund’s convictions collapse and his vision is muddied by his infatuation with Mary. And without constancy, any attempts at cultivating virtue will fail. A person who lies some of the time cannot be an honest person. A person who is cruel some of the time cannot be a kind person. Constancy is what allows us to truly possess virtue. And Edmund must strengthen this demanding virtue before he is worthy of Fanny.
In other words, constancy is essential. Without it, we cannot be virtuous at all. When we get to Northanger Abbey in a few months, we’ll discuss prudence which is also essential to living out any other virtue well. But it‘s these two absolutely crucial virtues that I most struggled to comprehend before spending months and months researching them to write the book—and they turned out to be the most important ones!
Discussion Question: What did you think of Mansfield Park? Is its reputation as “the boring Jane Austen novel” fair?
A Little Break
With three big events staring me down in the second half of July, I realized that I’ll need a short break on writing Austen reflections until August. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go ahead and start reading Sense & Sensibility, our next Austen novel!
Go ahead and begin reading (or start those audiobooks) and I’ll jump back in after all my travels in August. We’ll probably extend the discussion of S&S into September and then get back on track with Northanger Abbey which is a bit shorter than the other novels.
An Austen Discovery
After 40 years of being lost, Jane Austen’s music book has been found and returned to Chawton House (her brother Edward Knight’s home after wealthy, childless relatives adopted him as their heir).
Currently Reading
Finished this one on vacation and loved it so, so, so much. It’s technically YA, but if you love true stories that speak to the power of storytelling, our need to hold fast to stories that remind us of who we are, and hope that we must fight to cling to—well, this is a good one.
Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri
Currently Watching
I love a good murder mystery and Endeavour is one of my very favorites. The final season just released and I’m so sad it’s over. They were actually filming it when I was in Oxford last summer and I was really hoping I’d turn a corner and bump into Fred Thursday.
I mean…the music! The city of dreaming spires! The multiples murders every week in a small city that actually only sees one or two murders a year! I love it all. Without it, how would “mind how you go” and “Bob’s your uncle” have made their way into my vocabulary?
Upcoming Events
Lecture on chidren’s literature for the University of St. Thomas in Houston Summer Literary Series (July 18th)
Talk on Chesterton and detective fiction for the 42nd Annual Chesterton Conference in Minneapolis (July 26th-29th)
An Unbeatable Sale
For the first time in five years, the Kindle version of my first book, The Grace of Enough, is on sale today for $0.99! It’s a steal if I do say so myself.
So if you’ve been thinking about reading it, there’s no better time!
Not sure if it’s for you? Here’s a couple of short endorsements:
"Prophets wake us to our true state, call upon us to be better than we are, and demand that we think hard about the life we are living. And thus we shy away from prophets. Haley Stewart, however, won’t let us escape so easily. Hers is a genuinely prophetic voice, but one so full of fun and the sheer joy of living that she thoroughly charmed and convinced me. A wonderfully wise book for our confusing and misguided era."
—Paula Huston, Author of One Ordinary Sunday
"This book is an antidote to throwaway culture, a blueprint to living a fulfilling life. What St. Benedict did for the early monastics, Haley has done for modern suburbanites and families: provide a compelling rule, a practical life plan, one centered on community, simplicity, and charity."
—Brandon Vogt, author of Why I Am Catholic
And that’s all folks! I hope you have a wonderful Sunday. This email is free to receive but time-intensive to produce, so I appreciate those who make it possible for me to carve out time by upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you value these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.
And if you’re not in a position to pledge a monthly subscription but you enjoyed this post, you can always just throw some change in the tip jar.
Thanks for reading!
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
Mansfield Park absolutely does not deserve its reputation as boring. Mansfield Park suffers in our estimation because we live in a hyper-stimulated that values “girl boss” and extroverted heroes over the introverted, pious, and moral Fanny Price. Moderns can admire Elizabeth’s wit, Marianne’s passion, and Emma’s scheming and brush off/pay less attention the moral journeys these characters undergo. Fanny is morality and piety without any of the social or personal charms/characteristics other Austen characters have. We can’t ignore the fact that she is meant to be a moral measuring stick in this novel, and we find that her moral sense is a lot more robust than ours. And so many dislike her and call her a “prig.” Or those who admire her moral sense are irritated by the way she seems to let others walk all over her and generally refuses to call her family members out for their mistreatment and mistakes. She truly “turns the other cheek” and is a meek soul, who, by the end of the novel, “inherits the earth.” But again, in a society in which our virtues must be signaled over social media, where we have a moral duty to loudly “cancel” anyone who sins against the code of whatever tribe we identify with (right or left), Fanny’s approach seems unattractive if not outright repugnant.
I do agree with the comments above that people think this book is boring because Fanny isn’t spunky, whereas the other Jane books (and so much literature for girls and young women in general) has spunky heroines.
But, to take a slightly more sympathetic view of those in the “this is the boring one” camp, the other thing missing from this book is a character arc for Fanny. She doesn’t really learn or grow here, she just gets vindicated for always having been very good. I don’t have a real problem with it because I think the story itself is great and as a study of the virtue of Constance (thank you Haley!) it’s so good - but I don’t think it’s entirely unfair that people pick it up expecting some sort of emotional or moral hero’s journey for Fanny and are disappointed not to find it.
I (re)read this book TOTALLY differently, however, after reading in Haley’s book the BRILLIANT insight that the person with the compelling character arc is *edmund*. Puts the whole thing in a different light.