Author James Norris Brewer uses lecherous Methodists and radical freethinkers to liven up his tale of star-crossed lovers who get married in the third volume and have some more problems to sort out in the fourth volume in addition to uncovering the Big Secret that is quite obvious from the first volume. The narrator's voice is sardonic, while our hero and heroine indulge in the highest flights of exquisite sensibility. Consequently, the novel is an odd mix of overblown sentimental language, interspersed in a rather discordant way with the author’s  animadversions on  Mary Wollstonecraft, Methodists, social climbers and other bees in his bonnet, such as the drinking habits of Oxford scholars. 
    The heroine, Ellen Fitzjohn, was left in the hands of strangers as a newborn. Her mother was a soldier’s wife who died giving birth while travelling with her husband's regiment; the distraught husband was forced to march away to embark for the East Indies. (This soldier, everybody notes, has the air of a gentleman and not a common private.) Baby Ellen fortunately catches the eye of the local baronet, a lonely widower. He adopts her and raises her as his own daughter.
     Ellen grows up to be beautiful and virtuous. One day she goes to a nearby river to go fishing with an old family retainer; the bank gives way and she is swept off to certain death by drowning but luckily, a handsome youth who lives nearby leaps in and rescues her. With such an introduction, it is inevitable that Ellen and Charles Balfour fall in love... 

​    There are actually two duped guardians in this brisk two-volume tale. There are two heroines: both orphans, both heiresses, both controlled by guardians appointed by their late fathers’ wills. Both guardians want to keep the handsome inheritance and dispose of the girl quickly. There are two interlaced plots: one is all melodrama, the other is fairly comical (and in fact was "borrowed" from a comic play ).
​    Mrs. Cartwright orchestrates a story in which perils arise, and problems are resolved in a graceful and orderly fashion, like people dancing a minuet. Although there is drama, there is no great feeling of despair or tension, and this might be because the heroine, Harriot Pelham is intelligent and resourceful. She and her sidekick friend Lady Laura Antrim don't lose their heads or faint in a crisis, but rise to the occasion with female solidarity. There is a secondary heroine, Clara Aubry, a Harriet-Smith or Catherine Morland-like picture of ignorance, only fifteen years old, of whom one character says: “innocence, when it is accompanied by a naïve goodness of heart, has charms irresistible.” Given Clara's imbecility, Harriot needs an intelligent friend and confidante to write her letters to (since this is an epistolary novel), which is where Lady Laura comes in. She's the saucy sidekick of the story. They both look out for Clara. 
  ​  ​Harriot‘s guardian is her brother-in-law, Mr. Hoyle, with whom she lives, along with her older sister Caroline. Let’s plunge into the action: Thanks to a carelessly dropped letter, Harriot discovers that Mr. Hoyle is conspiring with a female panderer to abduct her, take her to a secluded mansion, rape her, and then stick her in a convent when he’s tired of her. Then he'll take her inheritance. She is determined to avoid distressing Caroline by revealing that her husband is a monster, so when she’s caught weeping, she pretends that she’s been crying over the pages of a tragedy. This brings a gentle rebuke from Caroline about indulging in “fictitious misery,” a reference to the common trope that novel-reading was harmful.
    After the initial horrible shock, Harriot pulls herself together... 

     As I've been discussing in my previous posts, one of the things that makes the "Mansfield Park-is-named-after-Lord Mansfield" theory questionable is the fact that many other novels used the name Mansfield for their characters without any evident reference to the Chief Justice much less to the issue of abolition. Here are a few more examples. 

   Recently, I’ve been seeking out novels from Austen’s era with characters named "Mansfield." I've published a few posts about them, but I had better explain more fully what I'm up to and my reasons for doing it.
      I am exploring the assumption--well, more than an assumption, it's become an article of faith--that the name "Mansfield" in Mansfield Park is a subtle allusion to Lord Mansfield. That is, our modern scholars take it for granted that a book published 21 years after Lord Mansfield's death would inevitably make readers of that era think of the eminent British jurist. The follow-on assumption is that the top-of-mind association for that reader, at that time, was Mansfield's ruling in the Somerset v. Stewart case which effectually ended the practise of slavery on British soil.
    I think both of these assumptions can be tested, or at least prodded at a little bit.
    As to why I am interested in this question: yes, it's true that I don't think Mansfield Park is about slavery, even though it's about a family with colonial property, therefore I doubt that an allusion to Lord Mansfield is intended. But I'm also perplexed about the way that scholars of literature can make these assertions without even attempting to test them--and they can be tested. We can look for evidence to support or detract from the assertion and we can weigh possibilities. I'm perplexed when scholars share assertions about Austen's meaning that have no more substance behind them than if they had communed with her shade using a Ouija board. They make little to no attempt to test the plausibility and historicity of their assertions, which of course leaves them open to the suspicion that they simply believe what they want to believe. As an example, some confidently believe that Austen viewed marriage in the same light as slavery, and subtly conveyed this message in her novels. They want to believe Austen was a radical girl boss, not a woman who held the conventional moral and political views of her time. 
​     Questioning our assumptions starts with placing Austen's work in its time, not our time....