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I just LOVED this book. It was delightful and charming. But more importantly it is redemptive. With Fanny and Edmund out of the picture—for the most part—the narrative has a chance to focus in on other characters. Susan, Fanny’s younger sister, and Tom, Edmund’s brother, for example. But it also returns to us the brother-sister villains, Henry and Mary Crawford. (She’s come back—and is actually renting a cottage from the Bertrams—but there’s a catch: she’s dying.) New characters are also introduced—the lovely Mrs. Osborne and her brother, the Reverend Francis Wadham. (He will be taking Edmund’s place in the parish temporarily.) The book is full of characters you come to love...and those you love to hate.

Appearances can be deceiving, and such is the case here. All isn’t as it first appeared, for example, in Mansfield Park. I have never been a fan of Mansfield Park, but I am a BIG FAN of this sequel. If you’re like me, you might want to give this one a try. You might just find yourself surprised!

Like most Austen novels, this one has to do with love and matchmaking. And so much more.

I’m sorry I can’t really describe it very well. But it is one of those where sharing a few details might spoil it. It is best to read for yourself and see where the story goes.

Some books benefit by merely being better than the one I’ve read before. While it would be easy to include Mansfield Park Revisited into that category, the fact that I finished the book in one day and cared about what happened to the characters proves that, gosh darn it, Mansfield Park Revisited was good.

Set four years after the conclusion of Mansfield Park, the story opens with the revelation that Sir Thomas has just died in Antigua and Tom or Edmund must travel there to settle the West Indies business. Lady Bertram deems it too dangerous for Tom, the new Sir Thomas, to travel to the tropics in light of the fever he contracted there years before. Edmund and Fanny are dispatched and spend the entirety of the book off page in Antigua.

Susan Price has taken her sister Fanny’s place at Mansfield Park as the companion to Lady Bertram. Similar to Fanny in many ways, but with more backbone, she keeps the household running and is the lone voice of reason for much of the book. Her good sense of propriety is tested when she discovers, too late, that Mary Crawford, now married to a Baron and deathly ill, has let the White House in hopes that returning to a scene of such happy memories, and the Mansfield Park air, will restore her to better health. There is also the expectation of repairing the broken friendship of her dear Fanny. Susan calls to break the news that Fanny and Edmund will be away from Mansfield for 6 months, at least, and much like her sister four years earlier, is drawn to the engaging, though faded, Mary Crawford.

Aiken has a canny ability to stay true to the developed Austen characters and seamlessly integrate and expand into leading roles the characters that were tertiary in the original work. I don’t always agree with where Aiken’s characters end up or how they get there and Mansfield Park Revisited is no exception. A little more depth to the Tom Bertram character was in order, in my opinion, but it is a small quibble in an otherwise entertaining book.

I first read Mansfield Park in my early 20s. A co-worker let me borrow her copy. It was my introduction to Jane Austen and, perhaps as a result, it has always been my favorite Austen novel. Although I’m not much of one for sequels to significant novels when they are not written by the original author (don’t even get me started on what’s happened to Gone With the Wind…), the thought of heading back to Mansfield sounded very pleasant. I was hoping it would prompt me to re-read Austen’s classic. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, but I was quickly reacquainted with Mansfield Park and its inhabitants and neighbors through Aiken’s Mansfield Park Revisited.

This novel picks up with Susan Price, Fanny’s sister, living with Lady Bertram and her cousin Tom. Tom, as the oldest son, has recently become the Lord of Mansfield Park after the unexpected demise of his father. Edmund and Fanny, married with two children, live at the Parsonage. Maria Bertram, disgraced after leaving her husband for Henry Crawford, a man who abruptly showed her the door, is not discussed. Julia, who made an equally impulsive and regrettable match, has two unruly sons and is constantly at Mansfield Park conniving to make a match between her sister-in-law and the new Sir Thomas. Lady Bertram, who mourns her husband only as much as is required, has even less interest in her children now than she did before they lived with her. The story gets started when, after Edmund and Fanny leave to tie up lose business ends for the late Lord Bertram in Antigua, an extremely ill Mary Crawford returns to rent the White House in hopes of improving her health. Her arrival raises what would be considered an uproar in an otherwise sleepy Mansfield Park.

At just 201 pages, Mansfield Park Revisited is not a lengthy novel, but there were portions that felt long. This can be attributed to a rather tame story line and the amount of inner dialog that could have been better conveyed through action. Julia and her sister-in-law Charlotte could have made a winning foils if only they did something other than gossip or complain. Susan equally could have been a stronger character had her struggles been more difficult to overcome. Lady Bertram also would have been more fun had she a little of her old bite back. When a hair covering lent to Susan by Mary did nothing to create drama, I started praying that Maria would come back to spice things up a little. This would have been a better novel had the author spent more time on the Roman excavation picnic and all that transpired afterward. The story line would have been better suited for a shorter novella.

Although it was not what I had hoped, it was a relaxing read. I would compare it to fan fiction, so the subtitle “A Jane Austen Entertainment” fits it very well. As the novel became more engaging toward the end and I found the conclusion satisfying, I would recommend this to other Jane Austen fans who like having something around the house or in your purse to read off and on as the mood strikes.



Joan Aiken is a very fine writer. Best known, and certainly best known to me, as an author of children’s books, she also wrote several Jane Austen sequels. I read her continuation of JA’s unfinished novel The Watsons earlier this year and have just finished this one. I’ve read rather a lot of sequels recently, ranging from dreadful through acceptable to excellent, and I’d put this one into the third category, though I did have some quibbles about the ending.

Just before the novel begins — about four years after the end of Mansfield Park — Sir Thomas Bertram has died. Someone is needed to settle business at the estates in the West Indies, and Lady Bertram is unwilling to let her older son Tom, now the new Sir Thomas, to go, as she fears he might have a return of the fever that threatened his life some years earlier. Edmund is more than willing to go, and Fanny — who never actually appears in the narrative — insists on accompanying him, taking their newborn baby along. Their older child, three-year-old Mary, is to be left in the care of Fanny’s younger sister Susan Price, now living at Mansfield and taking Fanny’s place as Lady Bertram’s companion and carer. It is Susan, now eighteen and an intelligent, good-hearted, though sometimes rather outspoken girl, around whom the plot revolves. Soon after Edmund and Fanny’s departure, Susan is faced with a considerable challenge. New tenants have arrived at The White House in the village, the one-time residence of Mrs Norris (who, we learn, has also recently died at the house in Keswick where she was living with the divorced and disgraced Maria Bertram). Those tenants turn out to be none other than Mary Crawford and her brother Henry. Susan is in some distress at this news, knowing that Tom has no time for the Crawfords, as he holds them to be to blame for Maria’s bad behaviour. But when she discovers that Mary is gravely, probably fatally, ill, Susan starts to visit her and a genuine friendship develops between them. Mary is a chastened woman with an unhappy marriage behind her, and what she tells Susan about the truth of Maria’s relationship with Henry is startling, to say the least. When Susan actually meets Henry, an instant rapport develops between them. Tom, meanwhile, is feeling ready to settle down, and has his eye on a wealthy and charming girl from a neighbouring village. She, however, shows signs of preferring Susan’s brother William, now a Captain in the navy...

I can’t even begin to enjoy a JA sequel unless the language is right, and Aiken scores top marks for this — I couldn’t fault her once. Her characterisation is also astonishingly right. Lady Bertram, Tom and Mary Crawford are exactly as we remember them — I was particularly impressed with Mary, who speaks and acts exactly as she did in JA’s novel, or rather as she would have done had she been in pain and seriously ill. Julia Bertram, now Mrs Yates, has developed into a horrendous carbon copy of her Aunt Norris, and treats Susan as badly as Mrs Norris did Fanny. And the new characters, invented by Aiken for the novel, are absolutely convincing. I particularly liked Mrs Osborne, sister of the vicar who has come to replace Edmund during the West Indian trip. The widow of an Admiral (unfortunately washed overboard on a sea voyage) she is warm, intelligent and delightfully relaxed. As for Susan, I thought she was great. No shrinking violet, she has had to learn to moderate her natural ebullience and her tendency to speak her mind, but she is a true Austen heroine in her natural sense of right and wrong. But, as I said at the beginning, I was not totally happy with the ending. It seemed to me almost as if Aiken had scrambled through to a conclusion in a bit of a hurry, and I was disappointed by the choice Susan eventually made, which I thought had not really been prepared for in any convincing way. But others might disagree. All in all, I had enormous pleasure in reading this, and wished it had been longer.


Mansfield Park Revisited: A Jane Austen Entertainment is a re-release of a Joan Aiken novel that was originally published in 1984. The book begins four years after Fanny and Edmund marry. Sir Thomas Bertram has died unexpectedly and his interests in Antigua need tending. Fanny and Edmund, now parents, are chosen to go, since Lady Bertram is hesitant to part with Tom, the heir. They take their son with them but leave their young daughter behind. As readers, we re-meet Fanny briefly, but the major protagonist is Susan Price, her young sister, who has turned into a sensible young woman - more forceful in her opinions and actions than Fanny - but equally devoted to Lady Bertram’s comfort.

Mrs. Norris has also died. Julia Yates, sister to the pariah Maria (did Jane Austen intend for those two words to rhyme?) takes over the Mrs. Norris role as a petty, peevish, mean, and spiteful woman.

“Miss Julia Bertram, having been so ill-judged as to marry the younger son of a peer, had soon, on becoming more closely acquainted with the limited extent of her huband’s fortune, decided to quit the doubtful pleasures of life in London on a straitened income, and console herself by becoming queen of a smaller society. She had persuaded her husband, the Honourable John Yates, to purchase a respectable property in Northamptonshire, not too far distant from Mansfield Park, therefore able to be illumined by some of its lustre. Since the, by almost daily visits to Mansfield, and by longer visits amounting to several months during the course of the year, Mrs. Yates was able to reduce materially her own domestic expenditure …”

While Julia tries to make Susan’s life miserable, she does not succeed, for Susan can see right through her. Thus she ultimately fails to put Susan in her place, despite her repeated attempts to lord it over her younger cousin. Tom and Susan are like oil and water for no discernable reason, except that Tom feels that Susan often oversteps her bounds and Susan thinks him lacking in substance and character. He spends his time learning the ropes as the heir to the Bertram fortune and pursuing his love of horses and racing. More sober and grown up than the man limned by Jane Austen, Tom still has much to learn about life and women.

Joan Aiken’s talent lies in developing Jane Austen’s characters further, and she captures Lady Bertram with exquisite perfection in passages such as this, when Edmund suggests leaving his daughter, Mary, behind:

“ The little dear. Of course we shall be happy to have her," sighed Lady Bertram, anticipating no inconvenience to herself in this arrangement, as indeed there would not be, for she could be quite certain that three-year-old Mary would be devotedly cared for by her aunt Susan.

Mary and Henry Crawford re-appear in the district shortly after Fanny and Edmund depart, which is when the plot truly becomes interesting. Without giving too much away, let me just say that I was surprised by the turns this book takes. Mary Crawford has changed greatly, which is all I will reveal, except to say that Tom becomes intrigued with her and that their association changes his life in a significant way. We also re-meet William, Fanny’s and Susan’s brother, who has now become the captain of his own ship. Several other new and interesting characters are also introduced, which keeps the story fresh.

Joan’s tale moves quickly and at times I could not put the book down. What I found missing from this very short but good novel was Jane’s sure sense of irony and wit. Ms. Aiken has writing talent (how could she not, being Conrad Aiken’s daughter and Jane Aiken Hodge’s sister?) but she fails to convey the tender emotions and human insights that distinguish a great author from a good writer. One key scene in the novel fell decidedly flat, and where I should have cried I could not. Ms. Aiken’s description of the event was so matter-of-fact she might have been describing a simple farewell instead of a wrenching death scene. I kept contrasting this scene with the way Jane Austen wrote about Marianne’s illness in Sense and Sensibility, and it was like comparing night to day.

As I said, the book is short (201 pages) and perhaps this is why I felt a bereft at the end. I wanted more time spent on how Tom and Susan finally change their minds about each other and begin to think of the other in a romantic way. As usual I am finding fault where others may not, for all in all I enjoyed the book thoroughly. Joan Aiken (1924-2004) might not have the stature of a Jane Austen, but she was a darned good writer and could spin an interesting yarn.

You can purchase the book from SourceBooks at this link.


I really should have re-read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park before reading this sequel by Joan Aiken, but I did not and enjoyed it thoroughly anyway. Or maybe I enjoyed it because I didn’t re-read the original — because there are elements that seem slightly out of kilter concerning the Crawfords that would have probably bothered me a great deal had it not been so long since I read Austen’s work.

What I liked best: the novel focused on Susan Price. She is a likable, spirited, and compassionate character.

It is a light-hearted look at what might have happened to the participants in Austen’s book, except that Fannie and Edmund play no real role other than that of taking a trip to Antiqua which removes them from the story.

Aiken manages Austen’s style quite nicely and evidently had fun doing so.

Thanks to Danielle of Sourcebooks for this one.

Author and scholar Aiken (1924-2004), known for her Jane Austen continuations, has imagined a sequel to Mansfield Park that’ll satisfy some Austen fans while enraging others. Heroine Fanny Brice has married her cousin Edmund Bertram and decamped for the family’s Caribbean plantation, leaving her younger sister, Susan, behind to serve as Lady Bertram’s companion at Mansfield Park. Less timid than her sister, but dismissed just the same by her finer relatives, Susan soon encounters the Crawfords, Henry and Mary, a diverting but amoral brother-and-sister pair who had nearly undone the proud Bertram family. Aiken’s sympathetic vision of the Crawfords’ fate, after their seduction of Fanny and her cousins, may strike a false note for Austen purists, but Aiken ably reproduces the author’s traditional plot twists and social comedy, if not her fluid prose or biting satire. (Oct.)






1. HAPPILY EVER AFTER?

Of writers of classic literature, few are more beloved than Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Their witty, mysterious, proud, and strange characters stay with readers like old friends. Indeed, these two authors have such a devoted following that a whole genre exists of sequels and retellings of their novels. This fall, three new sequels will be available to lovers of period fiction.

Because Austen presents such a narrow view in her novels—she usually focuses the point of view on only one character from a cast of dozens—the possibilities for sequels to her novels are endless. What is life like for Sense and Sensibility’s Eliza, Colonel Brandon’s ward? What kind of adventures does Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia have in Brighton? What happens to the characters after the stories end? These are the questions that a variety of authors seek to answer with the fifteen sequels published by Sourcebooks’ Landmark imprint...

Mansfield Park is one of Austen’s least-loved works. Its heroine, Fanny, was called “insipid” and “unbearable” by the author’s own relatives. And its “hero,” Edmund, is criticized as being “cold and formal.” Luckily, neither of these two are much present in Joan Aiken’s sequel Mansfield Park Revisited (978-1-4022-1289-5).

While Fanny and Edmund are in the West Indies straightening out Edmund’s late father’s business affairs, Mary Crawford and her brother Henry return to Mansfield Park and become acquainted with Fanny’s sister Susan who lives there now. Since Mary had been on the verge of marrying Edmund when her brother ran off with Edmund’s married sister, Susan and the rest of the Bertram family don’t quite know how to handle the situation.

Soon history begins to repeat itself. Young Susan finds herself drawn to her cousin Tom, while Henry Crawford is falling in love with her. Aiken’s characters are likeable and stay true to their origins.