Did Jane Austen ignore the world?
Perhaps the most vexed question in the discussion of Jane Austen’s work is whether Mansfield Park is about chattel slavery.
Though the evidence is quiet, it is significant. Mansfield Park reminds us of Lord Mansfield, the judge who freed a black slave in England. The name Norris has been linked to an abolition activist. Fanny reads Cowper and Johnson, prominent abolitionists. Sir Thomas owns a plantation and has a superiority over his English home as he does over his plantation. Fanny directly questions her uncle about his plantations.
It becomes difficult to deny that slavery has something to do with this novel.
In 1993, Edward Said accused Austen of ignoring slavery, which led to a body of scholarly work providing all the context Said lacked. Austen wrote at a time of great changes in the slave trade. Her brothers were at sea in the Navy. She read and admired abolitionist works. How can we not find slavery in this novel—Sir Thomas, after all, makes his money as a plantation owner in Antigua. Far from ignoring the world, Austen seems to have been fully engaged with it, but subtly.
To many readers, though, there is something intrusive and grasping about this question. It can feel as if modern values are appropriating beloved classics. Outside of the academy, the discussion descends into the attempt to take Jane Austen away from the long tradition of affection that has sustained her work in English culture globally and to wrest it into something more politically acceptable.
Such are many readers’ suspicions.1
So: how is Mansfield Park about slavery?
The most recent instance of this debate came in the New York Times recently, where the novelist Lauren Groff wrote:
I read “Mansfield Park” with its constant attention to enslavement and abolition to be speaking loudly and clearly about the subjugation of all of the vulnerable in the world to the will of the powerful.
This immediately throws up a hard question. If there is “constant attention to enslavement and abolition” in Mansfield Park, why doesn’t Austen just come out and say so?
Austen’s brothers were public abolitionists, as were many other people. In Austen’s lifetime, or shortly before it, Smith had opposed slavery, as had Johnson. Slavery was the explicit theme of many contemporary books. Reading Mansfield Park as an esoteric book in which we must find coded references to abolition ignores the fact that these debates were live and real. Mansfield Park could have been more openly against slavery had Austen wished it.
So what, exactly, does Mansfield Park have to do with slavery?
To read Austen properly, we require the sort of nuanced context that scholarship provides.
Amelioration or abolition?
The scene during which Fanny asks her uncle Sir Thomas about slavery is crucial to the question of slavery in the novel. Supposedly, Fanny challenged him about his slave-ownership. Said said that the “dead silence” which followed Fanny’s question is representative of Austen ignoring the problem. Here is how Fanny and Bertram discuss the conversation:
“Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”
“I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”
“And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.”
Mansfield Park was published in 1814, seven years after the Slave Trade Act of 1807. (Sir Thomas’s business problems are perhaps caused by that act.) If we see Fanny’s question in the light of the 1807 act, and contemporary debates about slave owners, another view of the silence is possible. (Slavery itself wasn’t abolished until 1833.)
George Boulukos argues that the scene depicts a pleasant conversation, not a challenging one, which, as Edmund says, appeals to Sir Thomas. The “dead silence” that follows belongs to the Bertram children—they are the ones at fault for their indifference. “Fanny, in this reading, does not confront her uncle about owning slaves; instead, she congratulates him for caring for his slaves properly.”
If the silence is awkward because Fanny has morally challenged her uncle about his slave-holding, why, as Edmund says, would Sir Thomas be pleased “to be inquired of farther”? Can this really be an account of an abolitionist clashing with a slave owner? (Had Fanny wanted to make a direct complaint about slavery, she would have done, as Jane Fairfax does in Emma, to the chagrin of the odious Mrs. Elton.)
More likely, as Boulukos says, it is a conversation between two ameliorationists—two people who believe in improving slaves’ conditions. The spoiled Bertram children are simply bored to silence by such involved ethical discussion.
On this reading, it is not possible to tell whether Fanny is advocating for amelioration (improvement of slave’s conditions, a topical debate in the wake of the 1807 act) or outright abolition (making slavery illegal, not just the trade of slaves). There was a distinction made between owning slaves and trading them at this time, but to some great extent, says Boulukos, the distinction between amelioration and abolition was not significant.
Confusing slavery and marriage…
This is neither Said’s view in which Austen ignores the world, nor Groff’s sweeping ideological claim. Boulukos is far more nuanced than Groff, who was following Helena Kelly’s reading of Mansfield Park from her book Jane Austen The Secret Radical. Kelly makes some sensible claims about Mansfield Park and slavery (it is her best chapter), but she makes no reference to Boulukos or amelioration. This is because her reading of the novel, like many modern feminist readings, requires the ending to be unhappy.
Once a critic feels obliged to deny that Fanny could possibly want to marry Edmund, she will be ideologically obliged to read Fanny’s character as submissive in the context of slavery as well. Groff’s was not merely a claim about slavery in the novel, but a generalized ideological view about subjugation.
Kelly argues that Fanny drops her moral resistance to slavery in the same way that she overlooks the fact that Edmund doesn’t love her. Austen (or Jane as Kelly insists on calling her) is trying to make her readers face up to what they already know (slavery is a great evil that is being ignored) and what makes Mansfield Park “deeply troubling” is that Fanny fails to face up to this truth.
The tragedy of Mansfield Park is that Fanny willfully—willingly—blinds herself.
The argument is thin. Fanny is supposed to have forgotten that the parsonage where she will now live was previously home to two women “who disliked her and tried to do her harm.” So what? The whole point is that Fanny patiently prevailed over those two women. She is vindicated, not subsumed. Edmund is supposed not to love Fanny, despite Austen writing the exact opposite. Indeed, Kelly has nothing to say about the actual words of the crucial final pages, in which Austen makes Edmund’s love explicit.
If we do accept, however, that Edmund and Fanny are happy at the end, we see it all quite differently. The morally indifferent characters like Mary Crawford and Mrs. Norris are exiled, and the morally concerned characters, Edmund and Fanny, prevail. Kelly says that Fanny “forgets” that she is Edmund’s second choice. But we can prefer, with Austen, to say that Edmund is diverted by temptation and Fanny has to practice Griselda-like patience, which is much more fitting with Austen’s themes of ordination, true religion, and the persistent moral sympathy that exists between them throughout the novel.
Austen knew that people like Kelly would come along and presume to know the feelings of her characters. She left a direct warning about such interpretations. Of Fanny’s happiness, Austen writes:
…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.
Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman … readings like Groff’s and Kelly’s rely not only on a willful blindness to these explicit words, but Austen writes that “the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.”
To believe what Groff and Kelly claim about Fanny’s subjugation, we must ignore what Austen wrote. This is a novel about the vindication of simple goodness in a compromised, often degraded, but improving world.
A novel of subjugation?
What of the idea that Mansfield Park presents many other forms of oppression or subjugation? Fanny is taken from her home and then made to live in her uncle’s house on deeply unequal terms. She is given an attic room, not allowed a horse like the others, made to do tasks for her aunt as if she were a servant, and frequently treated (and spoken of) as directly inferior. It is Edmund, one of the few genuine Christians in the novel, who stands up for Fanny and insists that she is treated as a full and equal member of the household. If she wants to, Austen is fully able to present the hierarchical dominance of her society as a form or mode of slavery, and thus to reinforce the “hints” about slavery on Sir Thomas’s plantation.
Sarah Marsh argues that “Austen insists that Sir Thomas’s absolute power as a slaveholder corrodes his aristocratic liberality as inevitably as the West Indian climate ruins his hearty English constitution.” Marsh says that historians believe Lord Mansfield’s decision “abetted the slave trade by excluding the wider Atlantic world from England’s cultural and legal abhorrence of slavery.”
Marsh claims Mansfield Park is saying that slave owning, which continued after Lord Mansfield’s ruling, corrupted the landowners of England. The result of the Somerset case was not, strictly, that slaves were freed, but that they could not be sold in England. Slavery continued, and so James Somerset was not a freeman but someone of indeterminate status, just like Fanny Price.
As such, concerns about the changing landscape in Mansfield Park reflect Austen’s concern that “long-established English commitments to freeborn labor have been fundamentally jeopardized by Lord Mansfield’s silence about British slavery abroad.” Austen sees Sir Thomas’s absolute power over Mansfield Park as an importation of his absolute power over the slaves, something Lord Mansfield’s decision failed to prevent.
But if we accept the traditional chronology of the novel’s action, which has Sir Thomas leaving for Antigua in 1805 and coming back after the Slave Trade Act of 1807, the reasons for his business problems are to do with the Revolutionary Wars between England and France. A blockade begun in 1803 dropped the price of sugar. In Jane Austen and the French Revolution, Warren Roberts writes that the price of sugar dropped from 55 to 32 shillings a quintel while Sir Thomas was in Antigua. The Antiguan government went bankrupt and many plantations failed. (97) Wartime injuries to Fanny’s father are also the prompt that have her sent to live in Mansfield Park. These themes are strong in the novel, as the scenes with William show. Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris are indifferent to him as they are to slavery. Henry Crawford takes it as a prompt to daydream vainly. It is Edmund, again, who responds with moral aptitude.
To some significant extent, then, the question of slavery is confounded with the effects of the war.
Who is subjugated and who is spoiled?
If Mansfield Park is a novel about slavery and subjugation, we must ask: why did Austen choose to make Sir Thomas one of the few people in the novel with moral integrity? Like Edmund, he (mostly, and eventually) treats Fanny properly. Like Fanny, he sees the theatricals for what they are: an excuse for immorality.
Thus, Groff’s view about “the subjugation of all of the vulnerable in the world to the will of the powerful” isn’t quite possible. The book doesn’t present the Bertram children and the Crawfords as subjugated: instead they are selfish, spoiled, and indulged. Mansfield Park is less a place of liberty than licence.
The theatre scenes show the Bertram children up as uninterested in what they ought to do, believing, presumably accurately, that they can get away with it so long as Sir Thomas doesn’t return early. They have no overseer, quite the opposite as Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris take great pleasure in talking down Edmund’s moral oversight.
In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler explains that private theatricals among the upper-class were a prominent point of attack for the increasingly successful Evangelical movement in 1814. Upper-class immorality was, to the Evangelicals, clearly linked to private-theatre. Austen approved of Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, which argued that all private acting (even in irreprehensible plays) was morally damaging to young women.
“Unquestionably,” says Butler, “Austen expects us to see the play as a step in Maria Bertram’s road to ruin.” Maria is not too much subject to Sir Thomas’s supreme authority, but too little. He chose her husband, but ignored her moral development. By participating in the theatricals, Maria was allowing herself to act on feelings over which she ought to have exercised self-command.
The wayward Bertram children cannot be saved by the staging or not staging of an illicit romance, nor by Edmund’s reasonable objections; instead, they ought fundamentally to be more like Fanny: they require moral education, the one great theme of all Austen’s work. Mansfield Park may be a place of some subjugation (it is, still, ultimately hierarchical), but it is also a place of individual moral failure. (As ever, Austen points to the parents as the problem. Lady Bertram is so indolent she is no sort of mother.)
It is this that links the slavery parts of the novel to the whole.
Samuel Johnson and passive obedience
The question of improvement is really what animates Mansfield Park. Fanny’s vindication is based in the idea of her moral steadfastness.
One argument Kelly makes is that we see Fanny reading Samuel Johnson, a great opponent of slavery. But Johnson would read this novel quite unlike Kelly or Groff. His works are clearly present in the novel as part of its larger moral vision.
It is the Idler on Fanny’s table. Isn’t the title alone a great hint as to what Johnson would object to about the Bertram household? Tom’s debts, Lady Bertram’s indolence, Maria’s moral lassitude, Mrs. Norris’s constant sponging, Mary Crawford’s vanity—so much moral laxity! so much idleness! Though Johnson may correspond with Fanny’s implicit abolitionism, he corresponds also to the besetting moral qualities of her character: self-command and obedience.
Fanny’s objections to the theatre would also be Johnson’s. Here is the opening of ‘Idler 52’ (14th April 1759):
The practice of self-denial, or the forbearance of lawful pleasure, has been considered by almost every nation, from the remotest ages, as the highest exaltation of human virtue…
Nothing could be more apt to the theatricals and Fanny’s attitude about them. Nor could one hope to write a better summary of the moral dynamics of those scene than by quoting this, from further down the same essay:
But the doctrine of self-denial is not weakened in itself by the errours of those who misinterpret or misapply it; the encroachment of the appetites upon the understanding is hourly perceived; and the state of those, whom sensuality has enslaved, is known to be in the highest degree despicable and wretched.
Johnson’s attitudes are present in this novel, but he is fully present, telling us that the “shameful captivity” of the “sensuality” of the theatricals “may justly raise alarms, and wisdom will endeavor to keep danger at a distance”. His strictness is a constant strain of Edmund and Fanny’s character.
Yes, the Idler has passing mentions of abolitionist sentiments (“of black men the numbers are too great who are now repining under English cruelty”; “slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty”) but as we saw in the quotation above, Johnson is just as likely to talk about the enslavement of sensuality, or, as in another essay, enslavement by “fear of evils to which only folly or vanity can expose him”. At the end of Mansfield Park, Edmund and Fanny are free, the rest enslaved to their folly, vanity, and sensuality. They are not enslaved by anyone else; they are enslaved by their own lack of self-command.
The question of slavery in Mansfield Park cannot be neatly abstracted into a political reading that takes no interest in the question of moral development.
Poet of abolition or of tree-lined groves?
Kelly also points to Fanny reading Cowper, the “poet of abolition”. Cowper must be read more broadly too. He accords with the novel’s interest in landscapes, not just abolition: Fanny quotes him thus: “Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.”
It is Cowper’s ‘Yardley Oak’ that seems to echo in this novel. On the visit to the Rushworth estate, the old avenue is all oak trees, symbolic of the established order of England: “Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak,” as Cowper has it in The Task. Fanny, we have to accept, though strong-minded and in virtuous opposition to those around her, is not a radical like Marianne. She regrets the passing of old landscapes. Her abolitionism is part of her establishment ideas.
In an Austen novel, one can be an abolitionist and strongly in favour of the social and moral order. In Johnsonian manner, Fanny sets a good moral example as a member of her society, a Christian, and a woman.
On the hating of Fanny Price.
Fanny’s goodness is why there is a long history of readers disliking Fanny. And that dislike, perhaps, accounts for some of the confusion about slavery and subjugation.
Virginia Woolf said, “There are characters such as … Elinor Dashwood and Fanny Price which bore us frankly.” In 1917, Reginald Farrer talked of “Fanny’s cold self-righteous attitude of criticism”. Austen’s mother thought Fanny was “insipid”. Even some early admirers of Fanny wanted her to be more. “Mary Cooke…Admired Fanny in general; but thought she ought to have been more determined on overcoming her own feelings, when she saw Edmund’s attachment to Miss Crawford.” A.C. Bradley, ever reliable, sums up the problem:2
…for some readers, the suppression of feeling and fancy in these characters… much diminishes their charm, and even suggests the idea which Jane Austen certainly did not hold, that good sense and dutifulness are apt to be spiritless or even depressed.
Spiritless is exactly the complaint most people have about Fanny. Kingsley Amis, (the first paragraph of whose essay ‘What Became of Jane Austen’ is one of the strongest and more accurate pieces of appreciation of this novel), found Fanny “deficient”. Like many of the people who dislike Fanny, what he objects to most is that she is not fun.
But then he takes his bit too far and calls Fanny and Edmund “morally detestable”. How easily the opposition to an imagined Puritan bogeyman leads clever people into intellectual bar-stool habits!
The fact is: Fanny is simply good, like Helen Burns, Agnes Wickfield, Dinah Morris, and Esther Summerson, and for many critics that simplicity is precisely the sticking point.
It is not enough for Fanny merely to be good: she must be good in the right way; So critics make her acceptable. For Amis that means interesting, for Groff it means she her goodness has to become radical. Amis found her morally detestable; to save Fanny, Groff has to find her surroundings morally detestable.
A simple yet detailed reading shows us that in Mansfield Park, as in many other of the nineteenth-century novels, good deeds shine out in a naughty world, and Fanny’s simple goodness is eventually matched to Edmund’s, once he has been on a quest of moral development. To ask more of Fanny is to expect her to be a Marianne, to ignore the fact that Austen plainly offers Edward for approval. Fanny is the one who says she cannot act, cannot pretend, and who really means it. To mistake this for inanity (Amis) or an invitation to make esoteric readings (Groff, Kelly) is to prefer our own moods, norms, and ideologies to the words of the novel.
All critics have their own agenda!
No wonder many readers are suspicious of the attempt to read modern values into Austen’s work. Critics do often confound careful, scholarly readings with bold, ideological priorities.
And scholars sometimes admit that readers are right to be suspicious! In Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, the great Austen scholar Professor Kathryn Sutherland justified the “post-1970s” movement away from Bradleyan, character-based criticism—(the sort of literary criticism that fully incorporates personal feelings, including those critics, like George Saintsbury, who gushingly admitted that they could happily marry Elizabeth Bennett)—on the ground that that sort of work is more sexist and racist than modern academics are “comfortable” with. Sutherland talks about the “partial and even offensive” consensus under which those earlier critics were working.
Although Sutherland wished to leave behind the (as she sees it) sexism and racism of the old school, she sees no need to replace Austen with “a more intellectually restless or formally varied” woman writer of the period, nor with a non-white, non-middle class woman writer (assuming, she Sutherland says, one can be recovered).
Instead, Austen can “accommodate” the readings the post-1970s critics wish to make,—readings to do with gender, critiques of the family, and, of course, slavery.
Put aside your feelings about which ever side of this debate you may or may not be on and notice the critical assumptions on which scholars like Sutherland rely. To justify her assertion that Austen “accommodates” many modern readings, Sutherland writes: “that’s what classics do: they license endless re-readings.”
Well who is working under a “partial consensus” now?
Sutherland presumably does not mean to the idea that literary texts are subject literally to “endless re-readings” so that we can super-impose upon them whatever ideas we find most comfortable or appealing, or begin to deny that they have any sort of fixed meaning... Austen was surely able to impose binding intellectual constraints on her novel, rather than writing a green-screen for later readers and their priorities.3
There is, of course, more in Austen than has sometimes been seen—including by the affectionate Janeites—but from Sutherland’s “endless re-readings” to justify a “post-1970s” attitude it is a swift flight to the modern criticism that finds in Jane Austen not the values that would have pleased our grandmothers, but those which would not offend the young today.
Although Kelly and Groff lack Sutherland’s scholarly aptitude, they share her critical attitudes.
Bringing ourselves into the picture…
So: when we assess a question like the role of slavery in Mansfield Park, we would do well to pay attention to the “partial consensus” of the critics who are so often working to avoid the consensus of the generations who came before them.
In their refusal to allow sentimental feeling to inform a serious criticism, (and in their ideological inability to believe in the power of Mansfield Park’s happy ending), many modern scholars are just as blinkered as they believe Bradley and the old school were.
At one point, Sutherland calls Jane Fairfax, in Emma, a “missed opportunity”, saying that Charlotte Brontë would have never passed over such a chance at psychological complexity. It is amusing, no, that accusing Jane Austen of not being Brontëan enough when it comes to character development is the very essence of Bradleyan criticism?4
This provides the background explanation for why there has been so much vexation about Mansfield Park. When we read literature, all of us confusingly mingle our personal reactions to the characters with our intellectual analysis of the book. That Sutherland and other scholars have an intellectual framework to express this problem doesn’t make it go away.
Vindicating Fanny
Fanny is allowed to be a good character (in both senses) so long as we aren’t disturbed by the thought that she might not be sympathetic to our own frame of mind. Amis rejects her because she wouldn’t approve of him; Groff embraces her on the basis that Austen can be co-opted as a progressive.5
But Fanny Price is not disappointing: she is Austen’s most morally persistent heroine. At the end of the novel, she is vindicated, free, and happy. She is not a warning, nor is she problematized: she sets the example Austen wishes her other characters to follow. Mary Crawford jokes bitterly that Edmund will reform everyone, but it is Fanny whose character shines out like a good deed in a naughty world. It is she who reforms Mansfield Park. The more we believe in the “endless re-readings” the classics are capable of, the less clearly we will see this fundamental truth about Austen’s great novel.
If Mansfield Park is about slavery (and I believe it is) that is because Austen was a powerful writer of conservative values and Enlightenment ideas. This maps poorly onto our own preoccupations. It neither fits neatly with the post-1970s expectations that scholars and critics have of themselves, nor is it intuitive to many of them that the anti-racist characters will be the most conservative ones. But this novel is from another time, another place. It is not part of our world.
Fanny Price is Jane Austen’s least admired heroine. In recent times, some people have come to admire Fanny—but often as part of their partial, post-1970s framework. She ought to be recognised instead as Austen’s greatest heroine without us contorting the words Austen wrote to fit our own ideals.
I have been told in flatly uncompromising terms at London literary parties that “Jane Austen was a feminist”, which is the sort of thing liable to start eyes rolling in the real world.
With very few exceptions the greater writers differ little in what may be called their ultimate morality; but two or three minor traits may be singled out in Jane Austen’s. One is her marked distrust of any indulgence in emotion or imagination where these are not plainly subservient to the resolve to do the right thing, however disagreeable or prosaic it may be. This meets us everywhere, and it has more than one effect. It leads her to approve of such heroines as Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price, and Anne Elliot; and we share her approval. On the other hand, for some readers, the suppression of feeling and fancy in these characters, or at least in the first two, much diminishes their charm, and even suggests the idea which Jane Austen certainly did not hold, that good sense and dutifulness are apt to be spiritless or even depressed.
Likewise, Sutherland makes the surely-mistaken claim (mistaken in that I doubt she intends to be held to the consequences of this line of reasoning) that “‘knowing’ or identifying with fictional characters remains highly important when it comes to explaining why we read for pleasure.” This dichotomy—reading for pleasure versus reading for analysis—is false. Are we to suppose there is no pleasure involved in Sutherland’s readings in Jane Austen’s Textual Lives? That was not my experience, and I doubt it was hers. But once we are “against” Bradleyan criticism and “for” what Sutherland calls the post-1970 order, we are more and more obliged to accept such ideologies. Does Sutherland really intend to argue that we must remove our pleasurable reactions to a novel in our analysis of what it is about? Can we possibly think pleasure so mono-dimensional and simple a matter?
While there is a great deal to be learned from the wealth of modern academic scholarship (my argument is not one that leads to those “all literary academia is rotten” vibes, rotten as a very great deal of it may), we must also be weary of Sutherland’s, and many others, world view distorting our understanding of Austen’s work. A great scholar is not necessarily a great critic. That is the heart of the “partial” consensus we must be weary of as common readers today.
Bradley wrote for everyone; Sutherland does not. Jane Austen is most relevant to us when she can be read as she would have been read in her times, or as closely as we can get to such a reading, not merely when she is read in a manner that feels immediately relevant to us now. We come to great literature to learn, not to discover that we were right all along.
Amis wrote:
What became of that Jane Austen (if she ever existed) who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? From being their critic (if she ever was) she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgment and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption.
Amis is the sort of critic who becomes, in Larkin’s phrase, smaller and clearer as the years go by. But it is striking just how directly opposite his and Groff’s readings are: two sides of the same error. To one, Austen is the epitome of convention; to the other, its quietly heroic opponent. Perhaps we can find an esoteric reading, which accounts for Amis’s surface reading and Groff’s, apparently, instressed one.
I've always found the line that Fanny is Edmund's "second choice" and that therefore this is a kind of acceptance of lousy leftovers on Fanny's part very strange. It doesn't seem like a fair reading of human relationships, or of the "bad choices" that many of Austen's other characters make on their way to the good ones (i.e. Elizabeth and Wickham, Marianne and Willoughby). It's interesting that we assume that Elizabeth or Marianne could make mistakes that better knowledge and understanding later corrects but that Edmund's choice of Fanny is "settling," instead of a product of his correctly diagnosing Mary Crawford as a moral wastrel and even a kind of female rake. And positionally, it turns Fanny into more of a Darcy or a Colonel Brandon, which makes intuitive sense to me. Like both of those characters, she has a kind of moral wisdom and uprightness that manages to uphold itself even under attack--and just like both of them, she sits by and waits until her love interest figures out that she's the right one.
It is rare to find such a carefully dispassionate, historically grounded reading of a literary work – rarer still to see that combined with honest and nuanced close reading. Jane Austen has been a moral battleground for critics for a very long time. This reading is positively redemptive and so refreshing.