Why marmite? Because people either love her or hate her (well are deeply irritated by her). What do you see Fanny Price as? A strong minded heroine – who’s morals cannot be altered. Or a priggish young lady who has to stick to the rules no matter what.

Jane Austen starts Mansfield Park with three sisters. The eldest makes an excellent match by marrying into money and becomes Lady Betram, the middle sister marries into the church and becomes Mrs Norris and the youngest sister marries a sailor for love and becomes Mrs Price. Yet this marriage is an unhappy one due to her husband developing a liking for the bottle and their ever increasing family. Fanny Price, their eldest daughter, is sent to live with her rich cousins (the Bertrams) at Mansfield Park and thus the story begins…

We want a strong minded, independent heroine, one who knows what she wants and is willing to work towards achieving what is right for her in life. Who are we introduced to? A tremulous Fanny, ten years old and very uncertain of herself. Then again, if at the age of ten I’d been uprooted from my family and many siblings and driven to a big house in the country, where I am expected to fit into not only a completely different way, but strata of life (my cousins having been brought up with all the advantages of money) then yes – I too would be deeply homesick and find it hard to adjust.

We follow Fanny Price through a series of challenges, all of which she responds to with such a strongly moral attitude that even Jane Austen’s mother called Fanny Price ‘insipid’. Fanny is a passive heroine enduring the big class difference which she lives with daily, always being reminded that she is not of her siblings birth, that she is allowed to live with her cousins, the Bertrams, but she can never be on the same social level as them. An awkward situation Austen doesn’t allow the reader to forget due to Aunt Norris. In every Austen book there is a strongly negative character and Aunt Norris is one of the most acidic. Childless, she has no problem in commenting about how all of her nieces and nephews should be brought up and Austen makes sure that we, like Fanny, are never allowed to forget how ‘fortunate’ Fanny is.

Yet Aunt Norris is only one of Fanny’s trials. Inevitably Fanny falls in love with one of her cousins (Edmund Bertram) and then has to watch as he falls for a woman who Fanny knows is most unsuitable for him. Jane Austen makes us share Fanny’s pain as Edmund repeatedly talks to Fanny asking for her advice as Edmund makes sense of his feelings.

This is cleverly developed when the four Betram cousins decide to put on a production of Lover’s Vows in Mansfield Park. Their father is absent or they would have never been allowed to do this, despite being young adults. Why? It is entirely because they are young adults and the people they are acting opposite allow for a whole array of sexual subtext and the pairing off on stage (at least) of who has feelings for who. This is regardless of who they may actually be engaged to, or are supposed to like. Sounds like a junior school high teen movie? The ideas are the same. Fanny is the only one who can see the moral implications and refuses to act. Jane Austen superbly heightens the drama by having certain characters using Fanny as a confidant. You might expect at this point that the consequential emotional pull would result in Fanny relenting, but no. She knows that the whole ides of acting and putting on the play is improper and despite the coercing even by her beloved cousin Edmund, Fanny stands her ground. Wimpy? Or a woman who knows her mind?

This is taken to another level by the wooing of the highly unsuitable Mr Crawford. While visiting in the country, a bored Mr Crawford decides for some sport, an emotional amusement – wouldn’t it be delightful to get the innocent and always morally correct Fanny Price to fall in love with him? We the reader are not convinced – love or hate Fanny – you can’t go passing a dull time in the country by making someone fall in love with you (or maybe you do…)  Mr Crawford tries so hard that he manages to convince himself that he has genuinely fallen in love. This is the time when Fanny should be saying she doesn’t believe Mr Crawford because she knows what kind of a man he really is, yet she is so good and true that she knows she’ll be compromising her cousins if she says anything to their father, her uncle, so she remains quiet. Elizabeth Bennet would have be announcing the truth from the rooftops of Mansfield Park (or at least penning a deft letter) but not Fanny.

For there is a moral resilience to Fanny, regardless of what you think of her, which is hard to argue with. Everyone in the novel thinks that Fanny should marry Mr Crawford but she will not. Not only does she quietly love her cousin Edmund, but she will not be persuaded that Mr Crawford’s feelings for her are sincere. He may think they are, but she is not convinced that a morally weak man like him could change so easily purely because he claims he has fallen in love with her. The pressure is piled onto Fanny as Mr Crawford helps Fanny’s favourite brother to be given a promotion in the Navy. She is genuinely grateful but she will not take this as leverage for Mr Crawford to gain her hand in marriage. Fanny makes an interesting comment “I think that it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.” This is a line that Elizabeth Bennet would happily vent – and it is a sentiment that rings true whoever you are. Why should you give into someone’s amorous advances merely because they want you?

Fanny Price is often referred to as a passive heroine, yet surely it takes a very high level of resolve, especially when disagreeing with everyone around you, in the very house you owe your livelihood to, to stand your ground. Fanny’s strong mindedness may not be vocalised, in fact as a reader you often feel Fanny’s morals rather than hear her voice them, but she truly is a heroine who not only knows her mind but stands her ground. She make not be as active as Elizabeth Bennet but in her own way, Fanny Price is just as strong.