Mansfield Park

I took it out of the bookcase yesterday to finally start my reread - to sooth my nerves and this exhausting cough (again!) and I was all into the reminiscences of how I read it for the first time . In the second year at University my obsession with Austen was only at its beginning and I was only starting to discover her novels and I tried to get a novel by her wherever I could (several years ago it was not that easy as now, though the books were more or less available at a couple of bookshops). One beautiful May afternoon (right after the English phonetic contest where all our group performed a parody on books we read that year - that was fun, and turned out to be the best performance (I was Nora Parker, a housewife from a set of dialogues we used to learn and turn into indirect speech - Meet the Parkers - , in an apron, with a brush and a duster and curlers in my hair :))), and a girl from iur group won the 2nd prize and was chosen Public favourite) all exhilliarated by the fun and success of it all and a bit disappointed that the camera a girl from our group brought was broken and spoiled the film (no digital cameres then yet!) so we do not have a single photo to remember it. We all went home but I had some time before the ferry (yes, spring was that beautiful time when all long bus commutes were over and I could enjoyably travel from home to the Uni and back by the ferry) I decided to drop into the English books shop we used to have near the Uni and there I bought my copy of Mansfield Park (a Penguin paperback exactly like the one in the picture above) and happily went to the ferry. It was a delightful quiet evening, with smells of water and grasses and mellow sinlight mingling, and there was another absolutely unread and undiscovered Jane Austen novel on my lap. And poplars around the port, with their bittersweet smell... I'm getting nostalgic. But indeed, it was a very happy time with no other worry than how I would pass the upcoming English exam (and we were so scared about it, but I got my "excellent" and could hardly believe it), a whole summer ahead after a hard-working year and all those wonderful elegant novels to be discovered!

Now I'm really looking forward to rereading the book and see if my thoughts about characters change, I have not reread the book ever since that wonderful summer. Maybe, Edmund is not the most attractive Austen hero, but I like Fanny quite a lot, even though I wanted it to stand up to herself in the novel. I wonder what I think of Mary and Henry Crawford this time. And I must prepare to bear Mrs Norris. She might be the most irritating character in all the 6 novels!