Showing results by narrator "Mark Groves" in All Categories

Mansfield Park is the third published and perhaps most subtle of Jane Austen's novels. It tells the story of Fanny Price, who, at the age of 10, is sent from her impoverished household to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle and be raised alongside her cousins. Fanny grows up as a misfit, not truly a member of the Bertram family, but too genteel to feel comfortable with her parents.

Lovers' Vows is Elizabeth Inchbald's controversial adaptation of the German play Das Kind der Liebe (The Love Child) by August von Kotzebue. Though it met with great success both on stage and in print, some were concerned discussion of premarital sex and the leveling of social rank. Today, it is best known as the play that the Mansfield Theatricals rehearse in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

This play forms part of a tetralogy which focuses on one of Wedekind's obsessive themes: the destructive interplay between primal sexual urges and social convention. Each play revolves around a powerful young female character, who has the power to control and captivate men, but who in turn is destroyed by the exercise of that power. In this play, the dominant female is Fräulein Elfriede von Malchus, an idealistic crusader who visits a brothel operated by the cynical impresario Casti-Piani in order to rescue a young woman who has fallen into his clutches.