(no subject)

I'm reading Mansfield Park, and it's a surprising amount of slog. I like Jane Austen, I really do! But poor little Fanny Price is abused (or at least neglected and treated poorly) and is not so much sanctimonious as constantly taking refuge in the only things she can be sure of, which are propriety. It seems to be her only defense that has any chance of working, when she tries to defend herself. And so this is a rather long novel in which a nervous young woman is much oppressed, but not even in a melodramatic way, just in a plausible, grinding sort of way.

But she gets a few good lines. And I did particularly like this one, as the world is currently all trying to convince her to marry a man she doesn't want to marry in the slightest.

"I should have thought," said Fanny, after a pause of recollection and exertion, "that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself."