Jane austen airmount classic12/22/2023 ![]() In fact, authors were rarely named on the covers of such series. In shaping their series, 19 th-centiury publishers recycled cover designs across a wide range of titles (many reprints were out-of-copyright authors like Austen) to build up their own brand rather than that of a specific author. Series bindings offered a one-binding-fits-all solution to marketing, giving each title in a publisher’s series identical weight. Production values and cover image make for a decidedly low-brow Mansfield Park. The cover image on this well-worn surviving copy shows Mary Crawford playing the harp for Edmund, while just behind her another woman (Fanny perhaps?) reads a newspaper whose pointed shape bestows upon the female rake a false set of angelic wings. On the backs of these oft yellow-bound books were advertisements that helped keep the purchase price low (on the back of this copy of MP is an ad for Fry’s Cocoa Extract). During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Austen’s novels were sold at stalls in England’s railway stations, fronted by tawdry cover art that deliberately resembled the popular penny dreadful. These “railway editions,” also known as “yellow-backs,” were the forerunners of the modern paperbacks sold at today’s airports. With the advent of train travel came a new market for cheap books in ephemeral bindings. Take a look at this historical sampler of Mansfield Park’s wide-ranging cover art: For how does a publisher sell the one story by the famous Miss Austen that is championed almost exclusively by die-hard Janeites and stubborn contrarians? The cover art on Mansfield Park over the last two centuries evidences how generations of publishers have tackled this problem, hoping to attract buyers with a range of visual lures. Rhetorical target practice on this heroine is not even a new sport Austen’s own mother “thought Fanny insipid.”Īs the most unpopular of Austen’s major fictions, Mansfield Park poses a marketing challenge. Lionel Trilling famously declared “Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.” More recently, Nina Auerbach blasted Fanny Price as a “killjoy”-daring to compare her to the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Jane Austen Regency Dancers (Living History Group)Ĭelebrating its 200 th anniversary this year, Mansfield Park is the ugly duckling of the Jane Austen canon-least reprinted and least loved.
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