Ordination and Revolution in Mansfield Park

This article makes three important assertions: it explains Austen's famous comment that Mansfield Park is about "ordination"; it shows that thematically the book is an anti-slavery novel; and it shows how Austen codifies her solution to the English anxieties of the French Revolution by implementing reforms in the institutions of the state, the military, and the church. The paper uses the Burkean terms of modeand substance to prove Burke's assertion that an estate, as well as a state, "without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."