Another aunt, a parsimonious busybody, married a Reverend Norris, and Fanny’s own mother rather too hastily married one Price, a lieutenant of marines, who has become an out-of-work heavy drinker by the time we meet him. To her great misfortune, soon after her marriage, Mrs. Price has nine children in 11 years, with not nearly enough money to support them, and in desperation she agitates for a rapprochement among the sisters, and the rich Bertram family at last deigns to help. Thus, the oldest Price girl, Fanny, is plucked from her pack of siblings and, at 10 years old, largely unlettered, hypersensitive and extremely timid, the girl is thrust into the life of Mansfield Park, a great estate in the country. Out of nowhere, this child raised in roughness is elevated to a class so far from her own that she feels terrified all the time, and is told in every possible way that she is worthless by her nasty, domineering Aunt Norris. Next to Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet or even Anne Elliot from “Persuasion” (who is perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of Austen’s heroines), Fanny Price indeed looks a little wan and thin, a bit of a party-pooper, mulishly unwilling to join in the fun when the superego of the estate, Lord Bertram, is away on his property in Antigua and the young people of the household decide to put on a play. This is an unjust assessment, however, because the other Austen heroines are full-grown women from good families who love them, if imperfectly, and poor Fanny is still just a child who is almost entirely unloved, having been forcibly removed from her family of birth, verbally abused on the daily, left to linger in an uncertain and inferior status in the house, and, among the noisy extroverted cousins, she’s the solo introvert who, if she wants to have any space at all to breathe, has to escape to a forgotten room that is painful to her because she has been forbidden to keep a fire there. This sensitive creature is so starved for affection that the scraps of kindness that fall somewhat indifferently from her cousin Edmund’s hand — giving her the paper so that she can write a letter to her beloved brother, the use of a horse for exercise, the gift of a chain — make her love him fervently. Austen so adeptly lulls the reader into seeing Fanny as something of a pale little pushover for the first part of the book that it’s a dash of cold water in the face when the girl, upon being wooed by the beautiful, rich and charismatic Henry Crawford, adamantly refuses his offer of marriage. She doesn’t dislike Henry, and, on a practical level, marrying him would solve all of her rather serious problems. She would no longer have to feel like a burden in her aunt’s house. She could repay her aunt and uncle for taking a risk in raising her by bringing to their family a husband with an elevated social position. She could do a great deal to alleviate the misery of her siblings in the crowded, dirty house in Portsmouth. She could at last have some freedom and money of her own. Her future would be taken care of; she wouldn’t have to fear what might happen to her if she, penniless and unable to work, found herself a spinster, having been unable to attract a husband. She would do some good, as well: Her gravity and moral clarity would save Henry from his impulsiveness, laziness and love of pleasure. But it doesn’t matter to Fanny how practical the marriage would be, or even that most young women would be ecstatic to marry dashing Henry, her cousins Maria and Julia included. No: She has seen the way that Henry Crawford plays with the affections of the women around him, and she knows that despite his charm and money, he is, deep down, a weak and inconstant man. In marrying him, she would be betraying her own good judgment and her heart. And so she simply refuses.