In 1954, Lionel Trilling declared, with regard to Mansfield Park, that “no other work of genius has ever spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and constraint, even for dullness” (11). Trilling’s assessment of Austen’s third novel as overwhelmingly concerned with “security, … fixity, and enclosure,” combined with his blithe dismissal of Fanny […]