Mansfield Park

The titled family of a wealthy estate brings their poor niece, Fanny Price, to join the household. A timid, retiring child, Fanny proves the most upstanding member of the clan, winning the respect, admiration and love of her new family. Frances Barber offers a sterling performance, bringing life and sparkle to each character. Her adept handling of several British dialects is deliciously enhanced by nonverbal utterings, including chuckles, sniffs, clearings of throat, sobs and the like. Barber convincingly shifts from lord of the manor to sniveling servitude at the change of a sentence. And her narrative passages transparently tie the whole family together into one beautiful package. R.P.L. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine


Listeners with the fortitude to make it through twelve cassettes of nineteenth-century British social mores will be rewarded with Austen's brilliant commentary on the society of her day and by Johanna Ward's solid reading. Her narrative style is unvoiced and cultured, but makes for difficulty in character differentiation, especially for listeners unaccustomed to this style of both voice and literature. Nevertheless, this is a lively and interesting choice for admirers of Jane Austen, but use cautiously with younger audiences unfamiliar with her work. S.G. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine