Mansfield Park and Education by Heather Neilson
Mansfield Park can be read as a meditation on education, in both the formal and moral senses of the term. Heather considers how the various characters in Austen’s novel reveal the results, both pernicious and beneficial, of their education. She also briefly considers the ways in which Mansfield Park resonates with other texts, both as influences upon Austen and in her own other novels.
Heather Neilson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UNSW in Canberra. After many years teaching in the English and Media Studies program, she now teaches in the newly established Indo-Pacific Studies program. She is the author of Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power, published by Monash University Press in 2014. She is a former editor of the Australasian Journal of American Studies and a past president of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association.