Rozema utilized the Bertrams’ connection to African slavery to emphasize their questionable morality and possible corruption. Sir Thomas and the rest of the family responded with silence. Upon his return to England and Mansfield Park, Fanny asked him a question regarding his slaves. Due to a financial crisis, Sir Thomas was forced to depart for Antigua for a certain period of time. Austen’s novel described Fanny’s uncle by marriage, Sir Thomas Bertram, as the owner of a plantation on Antigua. The writer-director allowed the topic to permeate the movie. And in this adaptation, Fanny eventually accepted Henry Crawford’s marriage proposal during her stay in Portsmouth, before rejecting it the following day.īut the biggest change made by Rozema involved the topic of slavery.

Fanny’s older brother, William Price, ceased to exist. Characters like the Crawfords’ half-sister and brother-in-law, the Grants, failed to make an appearance. Because of this revision, actor Jonny Lee Miller portrayed an Edmund who seemed a bit livelier and less priggish than his literary counterpart. Rozema also allowed the Edmund Bertram character to become romantically aware of Fanny a lot sooner than the character did in the novel. Mind you, Rozema’s Fanny continued to be the story’s bastion of morality – only with more what many would view as sass. Rozema’s script allowed actress Frances O’Connor to portray Fanny as a talented writer with a lively wit and quick temper. One obvious change that Rozema had made centered on the heroine’s personality. Changes that have proven to be controversial to this day. The result turned out to be an adaptation filled with a good deal of changes from Austen’s original text. In the end, she changed her mind on the grounds that she wrote her own screen adaptation. She claimed that she found both the novel and the Fanny Price character unappealing.

When director-writer Patricia Rozema had been offered the assignment to direct a film adaptation of ”Mansfield Park”, she originally rejected it. In fact, opinions of the novel and its heroine, Fanny Price, seemed just as divided today, as they had been by Austen’s own family back in the early 19th century. From the numerous articles and essays I have read on-line, Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, ”Mansfield Park” did not seemed to be a big favorite among the author’s modern fans.

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