joanna wrote:
>
> Ah, yes, Mansfield Park. The Cinderella story whose heroine is named
> Fanny Price.
>
> I keep harping on this point, but it bears repeating.
>
The name comes from a heroine of a Crabbe poem -- a young woman (described as a "meekly firm" by Crabbe) who refuses to marry a rich knight. And Crabbe's _Tales_ is one of the books in Fanny's collection. In both Crabbe & Austen it seems to be a simple (but powerful) irony: Fanny's fanny has no money price.
The punning reference to sodomy has recently been discussed at length on the 18th-c list. The Crabbe reference comes from Emily Auerbach's recent (and superb) Searching for Jane Austen. She locates and explores the reverberations of echoes/quotes/allusions in MP to Marvell, Milton, Shakespeare, Johnson, Crabbe, Scott, and Cowper -- whose poem _The Task_ reverberates all through the novel. Incidentally (citing Park Honan for this info) Mansfield was "a name famous name for high, honourable courage. As Lord Chief Justice the first Earl of Mansfield had struck at the roots of the African slave trade." Auerbach has pointed out that Sir Thomas, Tom Bertram, and Edward are the only men in all of Austen's fiction to undergo change in the course of the novel.
Carrol