I thought this version wasn’t as good as the last one (the Frances O’Connor one). I agree with the previous poster, they almost made Mary Crawford the heroine of this one! Weirdly, I thought the casting of the two main ladies was off, Billie Piper should have been Mary Crawford and Hayley Atwell Fanny! I think Billie Piper looks a bit like a villain with her fair hair and dark eyebrows. Of course these are just physical points that don’t matter very much but still ;)

Fanny is aparently a very tough character to put on film, she’s never like in the book. Even the Frances O’Connor one made her more like an Elizabeth Bennet (or a Jane Austen); in this one Fanny is always running around (in the book she’s very frail and easily tired) and agrees to act in the dreadful play. Now, I sound like these nitpicking Austenites who find fault in everything. Don’t get me wrong, I like a little freedom of adaptation, this version just didn’t fit with me.

I actually fell asleep for a while, watching it! The other BBC 2007 adaptations seemed better, happily.

I caught this on PBS as part of their “The Complete Jane Austen” and I am sad to say it was a little disappointing to me. It has been a few years since I read Mansfield Park so I can’t really comment on how much it stuck to or deviated from the original source, but I think it was the general pretty-close-to-the-page Masterpiece Theatre adaptation. Of course, I am very partial to the Frances O’Connor film from a few years ago, which took many daring liberties with the original, so that can account for some of the let-down. Mostly I think I was displeased with the way the director spent so much time on Mary Crawford’s character. Instead of being a villain, she is almost portrayed as the heroine (albeit a anti-heroine), while Fanny Price is stuck in the background. I wasn’t crazy about any of the casting or their acting jobs. All in all, not a bad way to waste an hour and a half of a Sunday night, but not worth buying, or even renting.