Mansfield Park: Jane Austen

Everyone looks upon shy, self-effacing Fanny Price as the poor relation among her four spoiled cousins at Mansfield Park.

Adopted at a tender age by an uncle and aunt who have grown rich from a sugar plantation in distant Antigua, she finds herself morally at odds with them and their offspring.

Her chief consolation is the kindness of the younger son, Edmund Bertram, whom she secretly loves.

The arrival in the village of city sophisticates Henry and Mary Crawford sparks a series of romantic entanglements which lead the Bertrams to the brink of social disaster and Fanny to the indisputable conclusion that propriety and pretty manners are not substitutes for integrity.