Mansfield Park Lesson Plan

In the opening paragraph, the narrator remarks that "there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them" (5). What does this mean and what sort of tone does this set for the novel?

As most readers will be aware, Jane Austen's novels critique or comment on the lives of the landed British gentry of the Regency Era and the plots explore how women navigate maintaining or improving their social standing through marriage. This quote reaffirms these conventions, as it describes one of the most important conflicts in Austen's novels, that of the dependence of a large number of deserving women on a rather small pool of...