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Fanny! You are killing me!"
"No man dies of love but on the stage, Mr. Crawford.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Of course I love her, but there are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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He will make you happy, Fanny; I know he will make you happy; but you will make him everything.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Indeed how can one care for those one has never seen?
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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He was in love, very much in love; and it was a love which, operating on an active, sanguine spirit, of more warmth than delicacy, made her affection appear of greater consequence, because it was witheld, and determined him to have the glory, as well as the felicity of forcing her to love him.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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I should have thought,' said Fanny after a pause of recollection and exertion, 'that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by someone of her sex, at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Maria was married on Saturday. In all important preparations of mind she was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The bride was elegantly dressed and the two bridesmaids were duly inferior. Her mother stood with salts, expecting to be agitated, and her aunt tried to cry. Marriage is indeed a maneuvering business.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Her heart was made for love and kindness, not for resentment.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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I am really not tired, which I almost wonder at; for we must have walked at least a mile in this wood. Do not you think we have? '
'Not half a mile,' was his sturdy answer; for he was not yet so much in love as to measure distance, or reckon time, with feminine lawlessness.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Without any display of doing more than the rest, or any fear of doing too much, he was always true to her interests and considerate of her feelings, trying to make her good qualities understood, and to conquer the diffidence which prevented them from being more apparent; giving her advice, consolation, and encouragement.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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She was of course only too good for him; but as nobody minds having what is too good for them, he was very steadily earnest in the pursuit of the blessing, and it was not possible that encouragement from her should be long wanting.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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I am worn out with civility. I have been talking incessantly all night, and with nothing to say. But with you there may be peace. You will not want to be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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He is blinded and nothing will open his eyes,nothing can,after having had truths so long before him in vain.--He will marry her and poor and miserable.God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable!"---She looked over the letter again."So very fond of me!tis"nonsense all.She loves nobody but herself and her brother.Her friends leading her astray for years!She is quite as likely to have led them astray. They have all,perhaps, been corrupting one another;but if they are so much fonder of her than she is of them,she is the less likely to have been hurt except by their flattery.The only woman in the world,whom he could ever think of as a wife.....I firmly believe it.It is an attachment to govern his whole life. Accepted or refused,his heart is wedded to her for ever.The loss of Mary,I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and Fanny.Edmund you do not know me.The families would never be connected,if you did not connected them.
Oh!write,write.Finish it at once.Let there be an end of this suspense.Fix, commit,condemn yourself."-Fanny Price
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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My beloved Lauraβ (said she to me a few Hours before she died) βtake warning from my unhappy End β¦Beware of fainting-fitsβ¦Beware of swoons, Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faintββ.
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Jane Austen
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I should have thought," said Fanny, after a pause of recollection and exertion, "that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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But you must give my compliments to him. Yes β I think it must be compliments. Is not there a something wanted, Miss Price, in our language β a something between compliments and β and love β to suit the sort of friendly acquaintance we have had together? β So many months acquaintance! β But compliments may be sufficient here.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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As for his sudden change of heart, he had suddenly remembered the end of Mansfield Park, and how Edmund fell out of love with Mary Crawford and came to care for Fanny. Dulcie must surely know the novel well, and would understand how such things can happen.
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Barbara Pym
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You are infinitely my superior in merit; all that I know - You have qualities which I had not supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you, beyond what - not merely beyond what one sees, because one never sees any thing like it - but beyond what one fancies might be. But still I am not frightened. It is not by equality of merit that you can be won. That is out of the question. It is he who sees and worships your merit the strongest, who loves you most devotedly, that has the best right to a return.β (326)
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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How then was I to be--to be in love with him the moment he said he was with me? how was I to have an attachment at his service, as soon as it was asked for?
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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There is something soothing in the idea that we have the same friend, and that whatever unhappy differences of opinion may exist between us, we are united in our love of you. It
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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I know he will make you happy, but you will make him everything.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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The gentleness, modesty, and sweetness of her character were warmly expatiated on; that sweetness which makes so essential a part of every woman's worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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The day was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and every thing looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other, on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound, produced altogether such a combination of charms for Fanny, as made her gradually almost careless of the circumstances under which she felt them.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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all of Janeβs heroines will marry for love and nothing else. Of course their suitors come with material advantages, and no one chooses foolishly, but what it really comes down to, for Catherine Morland, Elinor Dashwood, Lizzy Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot, is finding the right man. Or β¦ so you think at first. Janeβs novels are celebrated for the new meanings you pick up each time you reread them. And when Jane approaches the moment when her heroines must marry, it is possible to argue that something a little strange happens to her storytelling. Yes, this is a highly contentious suggestion, but bear with me. If you look at the exact moments where love is brought to a climax, and matches are made, you may find them a little abrupt, almost perfunctory. We donβt hear Emma Woodhouse accepting Mr Knightleyβs proposal, we donβt see Edmund falling in love with Fanny Price. And in the very final paragraph of Mansfield Park, the object of Fannyβs affections, like Charlotte Lucasβs, is defined as a house. It was Mansfield Parsonage that she now finds βas dear to her heartβ as anything.24 Perhaps Jane treated these events lightly, almost mechanically, because she didnβt really believe that a man, on his own, could bring a happy ending. So, if there is even a smidgeon of possibility that Jane herself might choose to marry a house,
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Lucy Worsley (Jane Austen at Home: A Biography)
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Henry, who is in every other respect exactly what a brother should be, who loves me, consults me, confides in me, and will talk to me by the hour together, has never yet turned the page in a letter; and very often it is nothing more than, "Dear Mary, I am just arrived. Bath seems full, and every thing as usual. Your's sincerely.' That is the true manly style; that is a complete brother's letter.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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I think, for oneβs single book, one would be wise to choose Mansfield Park or Emma rather even than Pride and Prejudice. βWisdom is better than wit,β as Jane Austen told Fanny, βand in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.β People who begin by loving Pride and Prejudice, may end by rereading the later novels more often.
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Jane Aiken Hodge (Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen)
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She was not alone. There was Mr. Rochester with a candle, followed by a very mousy little governess by the name of Jane Eyreβah, no, those were just the remnants of her dream;
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Vera Nazarian (Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights)
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But there was happiness elsewhere which no description can reach. Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope.
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Vera Nazarian (Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights)
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If I am missed, I may be foundβby those who want to see me.
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Vera Nazarian (Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights)
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Time had healed her of it, time and joyful circumstances of a personal nature.
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Vera Nazarian (Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights)
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But manner Fanny did not want. Would they but love her, she should be satisfied.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel in some degree as you do-who have not at least been given a taste for nature in early life. They lose a great deal.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Upright, she's slapped with the aroma of musk and sweat. It's the good hunky, 'shirtless man building a dollhouse for his daughter' kind of perspiration, not the 'he just mowed the lawn' kind of stench.
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Sandy Ward Bell (Parked at the Mansfields')
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He did not want them to die of love; but with sense and temper which ought to have made him judge and feel better, he allowed himself great latitude on such points.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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acknowledgements
Huge thanks, obviously, to the superhuman Jane Austen for her books. Besides those masterpieces, I also reviewed (obsessively) the BBC 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice, as well as Emma (1996), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Persuasion (1995), and Patricia Rozemaβs gorgeous revision of Mansfield Park (1999).
Iβm also indebted to Daniel Poolβs What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew for period information. The World of Jane Austen, by Nigel Nicholson, who also useful, and I scoured the Web site Jessamynβs Regency Costume Companion for clothing information. Despite the research, Iβd be surprised if I didnβt make mistakes, but theyβre sure to be my fault, so please donβt blame my sources.
Special thanks to the amazing Amanda Katz for her inspired editing, as well as to Nadia Cornier, Cordelia Brand, Ann Cannon, Rosi Hayes, and Mette Ivie Harrison. And can I just say again how much I love Bloomsbury? I do. Everyone there is so cool. And also quite attractive (though that hardly seems fair, does it?).
And honey, you know that this Colin Firth thing isnβt really serious. You are my fantasy man and my real man. I need no other fella in all the world besides you. Itβs just a girl thing, I swear.
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Shannon Hale (Austenland (Austenland, #1))
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Fraternal love, sometimes almost everything, is at others worse than nothing.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Her sentiments towards him were compounded of all that was respectful, grateful, confiding, and tender.
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
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Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love
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Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)