Mansfield Park is the only one of Jane Austen's novels to extend the use of nature description into a series of passages which mark stages in the psychological development of its heroine. Fanny Price has, of course, been associated with the tradition of sensibility: she looks out of
windows and sees the sublime; she quotes Cowper against cutting down trees; she is a preserver.'2 Yet those readers who take notice of Fanny's poetic sensibility are forced to swallow down her embarrassing effusions about nature, linking the ideas in them to her moral function as a re-newer of traditional values. Only one critic has, somewhat tentatively, suggested that Fanny grows out of the didactic schoolgirlish ways of talking that we hear early in the novel.