When Jane Austen undertook Mansfield Park, she was anything but distressed or distraught. Indeed, she was chuffed with the achievement of Pride and Prejudice, while at the same time thinking about taking another direction. Mansfield Park is the first novel that Austen composed and published entirely in her adulthood and in it we can see her authorial muscle. It is altogether a bigger novel, and its ambition is apparent in the scope and sometimes symbolic resonance of its scenes and in the public importance of issues it raises. The first and most startling departure in Mansfield Park is its shy, inhibited heroine, Fanny Price. Painfully self-conscious, abashed, even abject, Fanny is certainly Austen's most controversial character, sometimes loved as a gentle dutiful Christian girl, sometimes deplored as a passive aggressive killjoy, and sometimes loved and hated alike as a sort of perversely powerful vampire.