Mansfield Park - a little underwhelmed

So, a Jane Austen novel, on audio format, read by the delicious Juliet Stephenson ... I couldn't have been happier ... unfortunately, this feeling didn't last. Mansfield Park is the story of a family in crisis. We start with three sisters, one of whom marries the wealthy Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, the second is widowed young and attaches herself to her well-heeled sister, and one marries the lowly Mr Price and produces nine children. The Price's are struggling, and Sir Thomas agrees to help by taking on one of the daughters, Fanny, as a companion for his own children and sets up her brother in the navy. Time moves on, and after a shaky start, Fanny finds her feet, forming a particularly close bond with her cousin Edmund. When worldly wise siblings, Henry and Mary Crawford move into the neighbourhood, things get complicated. Henry is an outrageous flirt and toys with the affections of both Bertram sisters, and Mary makes a play for Edmund, though is less enthusiastic when she discovers he is intending to become a clergyman. Fanny Price observes all the goings on, but cannot intervene. When the Crawfords take their leave, Fanny hopes things will go back to normal, despite Edmund pining for Mary. However, the Crawfords just will not stay away from the Bertrams and a scandal is inevitable. I have really enjoyed Jane Austen novels, particularly in audio format, but Mansfield Park just didn't do it for me. I found Fanny to be an insipid heroine, without much spark, and I found it hard to like any of the characters much. I felt the story to be overly long, taking an absolute age for anything to happen. Too many scenes are pretty much the same scene regurgitated again and again. There are moments when I thought, at last, here we go, but then things would just dither about again and left me frustrated. And then, at the end, everything was wrapped up so quickly it felt like the author had got so bored that she just dashed off an ending just to get it finished! I expect I wasn't in the right frame of mind for this book, and if I had read it at another time, my reaction may well have been more generous. It certainly won't put me off Austen, whose writing I hugely admire, but I would not recommend that this would be the first of her work to read.

My STAR rating: THREE.

Length: 400 print pages.
Price I paid: £4.95.
Formats available: print, unabridged audio download, dramatised audio CD, ebook., CD-ROM.