Mansfield Park would have gotten 4 stars if I hadn't become so irritated with the main character by the time I was finished with it. Fanny Price is a morally upright, humble young woman set against a tapestry of bumbling and comically foolish characters. However, she grated on my nerves at the end by her passivity, meekness, and tendency to think badly of all the people around her except her cousin Edmund. Although in the end her impressions of everyone were actually pretty dead-on, I was so annoyed by that point by how easily "distressed" Fanny was that her shrewdness didn't really matter. The story itself was enjoyable, a showcase of Austen's incredible perception of human nature; nothing less than what we've naturally come to expect from her, but the conclusion was a little disappointing. I would have been happier if Edmund had actually fallen madly in love with Fanny. Instead it felt like they were both settling for sibling affection to base a marriage on. Actually, I would have been happier if the Crawfords had turned out to be the perfect matches for Fanny and Edmund, like I thought they would, instead of having the cousins marry each other. Overall Mansfield Park is a good read, and my only real complaint is the absence of the passion that Jane Austen weaves so masterfully into her other works.