Ellen Moody admits that only 1796-1797 fully works with the two strongly given dates in the text (Thursday, December 22 for the ball at Mansfield, and a “particularly late” Easter the following spring) but goes with R. W. Chapman’s 1808-1809 dates for the main body of the story, with a bit of handwaving about how the novel is obviously pieced together from partial drafts written at different times, and the “particularly late Easter” is merely an artifact of that process. Here, I am going with the 1796-1797 timeframe for the main plot, which I consider to start with the arrival of the Crawfords and the testing of Edmund and Fanny, and backdating accordingly. But the calendar of the book is heavily debated by scholars, and if you’re doing some sort of crossover work with the elder generation of another Austen novel, you have a lot of room to fudge the timeframes with this one. 

This novel is comparatively easy, in that we have three sisters and their husbands and maybe two other, basically offscreen, sets of parents to keep track of. We start with the fabulous Miss Wards: Miss Elizabeth(1) Ward, Miss Maria Ward and Miss Frances Ward. They were apparently all three of them very good-looking, possibly blonde(1.5) with seven thousand pounds apiece(2) which translates to 350 pounds a year or 87.5 pounds a quarter. 

-Maria Ward was possibly the middle sister. She was probably good at the “see and be seen” aspects of the marriage market, and even in the present-day part of the novel she retains a mild interest in other women’s appearances and questions of dress and hairstyle. Based on what we know about her in the present-day of the book, she had pleasant if shallow manners, an even temper, and a tendency to agree with whoever spoke to her last. Around 1766 (thirtyish years before the present-day of the novel), the baronet Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, became infatuated with her and married her.  

–A lot of my fascination with Sir Thomas is that he feels so much like a Darcy who married the wrong woman and raised his children fairly badly,(2.5) with his elder daughter’s elopement being the kick in the teeth for him that “had you behaved in a more gentleman-like fashion” was for Darcy. I’ve said before that the novel leaves us room to imagine that his property in Antigua possibly ran on free labor rather than slaves, and strongly implies that his views on the slave trade are not very different from those of Edmund and Fanny (who read abolitionists with approval). For these reasons, I tend to resist the simplistic readings of him as a slave-driving ogre. Also, because I am intrigued by the irony of someone who’s relatively enlightened on the subject of chattel slavery but starts throwing his weight around the minute his niece doesn’t want to marry the first eligible man who proposes to her.  

—The first reference to his “West Indies property” in the book occurs something like sixteen-seventeen years after his marriage, so possibly it belonged to a relative at the time of his courtship of Maria Ward, and he only inherited it later. The subtext of “oh, shoot, now I need to do something about that property on the other side of the world” when he leaves for Antigua feels to me like he doesn’t see the place as a core responsibility the way he does with Mansfield and associated lands, and that he is at that point suddenly waking up to this other set of responsibilities.  

–In any case, imagine a less angsty Darcy who never met Elizabeth Bennet, courting a wealthier, more posh, legitimately born Harriet Smith. There was probably a Caroline Bingley or Lady Susan analogue floating around, making Maria Ward look pretty good by comparison. Whoever that was, it wasn’t Maria’s elder, bossier sister, because Sir Thomas retains a positive opinion of her until his daughter’s adultery and elopement. 

-The eldest sister,(3) Miss Elizabeth Ward was probably always a rather unpleasant bossy-boots, although less intolerable than she afterwards became. We are told that she only married six years  after her younger sister Miss Maria Ward, i.e. in 1772, and that was to a clergyman friend of her brother-in-law. This suggests that she tended to rub people the wrong way, or possibly that she had some unadmitted(4) dislike of the whole procreation thing, and sort of accidentally-on purpose sabotaged the courtships of any men who would expect that from her. The Ward parents seem to be no longer living by the time of Frances’s marriage(5), so possibly they died after 1766 but before 1772. If so, the mourning period would take a chunk out of Elizabeth Ward’s time on the marriage market, but not enough to account, on its own, for her marrying so much later than her sister. 

–Her eventual husband, Mr. Norris, received the Mansfield living from his friend Sir Thomas, which is implied to come with an income of around 600 pounds a year (the Norrises’s combined income is “little less than a thousand pounds”). He is almost a complete nonentity in the book, from the point when he marries Elizabeth Ward to the point when he dies around twenty years later.  

–His wife makes his gout and discomfort with children’s noise an excuse not to take Fanny to live with her. Maybe that has some basis in fact, but we have to weigh Mrs. Norris’s distorted concept of reality against Mr. Norris’s friendship with the starchy, uptight Sir Thomas and the fact that Edmund and Fanny had to have some positive example of the clergy in front of them, or they probably wouldn’t view the office with as much respect as they do. In light of this, I am inclined to think that Mr. Norris’s gout was the result of an injury rather than over-indulgence in food or drink, and that he was one of these good-natured, math-challenged Anglican clerics you meet with in the novels of Dorothy Sayers or Margery Allingham. His generosity towards his parishioners and lack of money-sense probably made his wife’s controlling, miserly tendencies worse, and he was either unable to have children (either due to age or the aforementioned injury) or uninterested in doing so. 

-Miss Frances Ward’s impulsive marriage to a lieutenant of marines feels like youngest-child behavior, and she seems to have married not long after her sister did. My suspicion is that the two elder sisters were close in age, maybe a year apart, but that there was maybe a five-year spread between Elizabeth (eldest) and Frances (youngest). Frances is described being similar to Maria Ward in personality: good-natured but shallow, self-centered, disinterested in what you might call the managerial aspects of her lifestyle, prone to stupid forms of favoritism. Her affection for Betsey, her youngest daughter seems to be tied up in Betsey’s status as the one she was pregnant with when she reconciled with her sisters, and the one who had Mrs. Norris as a godmother. The letter Frances sent to her family on the occasion of her marriage was apparently fairly spiteful, which suggests either a sharper temper than Maria’s, or that it was largely the handiwork of her husband… 

–Regarding Lieutenant Price, we need to get something important out of the way first: MARINE OFFICERS ARE NOT NAVAL OFFICERS; NAVAL OFFICERS ARE NOT MARINE OFFICERS. British Naval officers at this period were counted as gentlemen, and received bonuses based on enemy ships and cargoes captured. Marine officers didn’t have the status, and I’m getting conflicting info on whether they received any part of the bonuses. They were the hard-nosed characters who maintained discipline aboard ship, saved the officers’ genteel hides by putting down mutinies, and risked their lives boarding enemy ships in the capture process, while the Naval crew was busy looking after their own ship. We’re talking about the toughest men aboard ship, with arguably the most brutal jobs. I have to assume it was his swashbuckling qualities that drew Frances to him, and that he was also very good-looking. If it’s important to you to portray him as a sufferer from PTSD, you could probably do that, as long as you realize that he lived in a society which didn’t really have a way of diagnosing that, and didn’t use our terms to describe it. 

–It’s worth noting that in the present day of the book, he can put on very respectable manners when he feels the need, like around Henry Crawford, he just doesn’t bother with nice manners around his family. Probably Frances Ward, object of his courtship, saw more of his “company” manners than she did as Mrs. Price, his wife. He’s also literate, in that he reads newspapers and so on. Their eldest surviving child, William,(5.5) was born about a year after their marriage, so either they were not intimate before marriage, or whatever child they conceived before marriage died soon after birth. 

–There’s not really a lot of justification for the 1999 film’s portrayal of him as a sleazy thug who possibly molests his own daughters. His only reference to violence in civilian life is when he says that Henry Crawford and Maria Rushworth should both be flogged (6) for adultery, which at least has the merit of punishing them both equally instead of letting Crawford off the hook, and may in any case be a bit of hyperbole. He’s one of the only Jane Austen characters who cusses hard enough for his author to censor him, and of course this shocks the sheltered Fanny. Fanny also complains to herself about his “coarse jests” about her love life, but the only comment we actually hear from Lieutenant Price on the subject sounds like something Mrs. Jennings would say. Susan and Betsey, his other surviving daughters, are rather feisty personalities, who give no indications of being abuse victims.  

–He was probably not a serious alcoholic at the time of his courtship of Frances, and maybe only became so later after the injury that disabled him for active service. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with his voice, eyes, or legs, which leaves his arms. It’s possibly that one of them was broken and didn’t mend well. Maybe he recovered enough use of it to help hold up a newspaper, but not enough for the very physical lifestyle of an active Marine. This injury occurred within the first eleven years of his marriage, based on what the first chapter of the book tells us, but probably on the later side, since it is around the eleven-year mark that Mrs. Price resumes contact with her family. 

— I don’t have good information about what his “half-pay” income would have been; the AI Perplexity guesstimates it at 90-100 pounds a year, which would be between a third and a quarter of his wife’s income from the interest on seven thousand pounds a year. Four hundred-mumble pounds a year is rather less than what the four Dashwood women have in S&S, since the Dashwoods are living off the interest from ten thousand pounds invested in the five percents, so around five hundred pounds. The Prices are a household of seven when we meet them at Portsmouth in the book: two parents, five children at home (one daughter being deceased and William and Fanny being only rare guests). They are nearly double the Dashwoods in number on somewhat lower income, but in fairness they don’t seem to have expensive tastes. Neither Susan nor Betsey are “out” in the gentry sense, nobody in the Price household paints or plays music, and none of them are great readers of books until Fanny introduces Susan to the circulating library. I regret to say that Lt. Price’s liquor problem is probably their main income sink. 

–We don’t know much about his friends in the Navy or Marines, especially those who might have been in his life at the time of his courtship of Frances. There is an Admiral Maxwell (an old man in the present day of the book) whose wife stood godmother to the Prices’ deceased daughter Mary (and therefore probably was a Mary herself). You could maybe imagine him as a Captain Maxwell at the time of the Ward-Price courtship. Lt. Price probably served aboard Maxwell’s ship at some point, and that’s how they know each other. 

–I’ve seen people fantasize about casting Fanny as biracial, with her father being of African descent. I get where they’re coming from. It underlines the possible connection to the real life Dido Belle and her uncle Lord Mansfield. Fanny’s father came from a class where men of color were probably more common than the ordinary rural gentry of Austen’s world. You could also build up the “Redemption of Sir Thomas Bertram” subplot, by having him not think that hard about slavery until he goes to Antigua, and sees the abuse and oppression of people who remind him of his niece.

—However, this was probably not Jane Austen’s intention: she specifically describes Fanny as fair-haired, which implies the same thing about the appearances of the Price parents that the “fair” Bertram children imply about their parents.(1.5) But given the astonishing number of P&P adaptations that can’t be bothered to notice that Mr. Collins is in his mid-twenties instead of significantly older, or that think Mr. Darcy is a tongue-tied, inarticulate oaf, I don’t know that there’s any harm in casting Fanny and her father in this way, especially if it forces the Mansfield Park adaptors to treat Mr. Price with more nuance than the 1999 film did.

This ran longer than I expected, but the fathers of Mansfield Park, demonized by the 1999 film for qualities they don’t necessarily possess in the book, are a great outlet for my contrarian tendencies. I don’t think they were great or flawless human beings; but in a novel full of messy, complicated people, it makes more sense to me to interpret them as messy, complicated people than as outright ogres. 

Next time: The complicated dynamics of the Crawford family, and a brief look-in at the Yateses. 

(1) In the past, I’ve speculated about Miss Ward/Mrs. Norris having been named Julia, with her niece being named after her, having forgotten that Mrs. Norris had a godchild, Betsey, among the Price children, and that the godchild was probably named after her. Hence, I list Mrs. Norris’s Christian name as Elizabeth here. 

(1.5) Fanny Price is described as fair-haired, and the Bertram children are all described as being “fair,” implying that possibly they got this trait from their respective mothers, who are sisters. We can also assume that Jane Austen thought of Sir Thomas and Mr. Price as pale-ish men, possibly but not necessarily blonde themselves.

(2) We are only told the size of the fortune of the future Lady Bertram, but since she is a younger daughter, there is no reason to suppose that the future Mrs. Norris or Mrs. Price had less coming to them, originally, especially since the narrator seems to imply that the people around them considered the Ward sisters equal in beauty and fortune.

(2.5) His eldest son is a wastrel who straightens up after a bad illness, his younger son is an idealistic dork who eventually figures out that two strong-willed people with incompatible values probably shouldn’t marry. His daughters are a pair of selfish brats with a veneer of genteel manners, but the younger occasionally shows signs of not being a waste of oxygen, notably when she refuses to be drawn back into Henry Crawford’s games, after having her heart broken by him once. Note that the sons, whom he would have had more influence over, seem to be less messed up than the daughters, who would have been mostly raised by the women of the family. 

(3) The narrator calls Mrs. Norris “Miss Ward” before her marriage, which implies she is the oldest of the sisters. 

(4) Even to herself, for she is very good at deceiving herself. 

(5) At least, they are never referenced in the context of Frances Ward writing to her relatives on the occasion of her marriage to Lt. Price. 

(5.5) Lt. Price is probably also a William like his eldest son, but in this context it’s confusing to refer to him by his full name. 

(6) a common punishment aboard ship, and one Lt. Price would probably have been expected to carry out.