Jane Austen's appeal as a writer has often been said to lie in her creation of safe havens. In fact the atmosphere of stability and calm that prevails in the novels drafted at Steventon is invariably shown to be illusory, and this disclosure is all the more unsettling for arising, in each case, out of what is ordinary and accepted – from laws that dictate dispossession, from trusted stereotypes that disguise evil, or from benign first impressions that defer its recognition. In Mansfield Park, however, the illusion of natural harmony is continuously under assault, so that Fanny Price, window-gazing on a starlit summer's night, breaks off her rhapsody to invoke the wickedness and sorrow of the world (113). The novel opens, significantly, not with the Park itself but with Portsmouth, and the sketch of the ‘large and still increasing’ Price family – who have to make do on the ‘very small income’ of their disabled father in the Marines – sets the tone for a narrative in which struggle and hardship are dominant motifs. Even the seemingly unassailable prosperity of the Bertram family is shaken when losses on their West Indian estate prove severe enough to suggest that, as a relief from the expense of her support, the newly adopted Fanny be given over to the care of her aunt Mrs Norris (24), a fate reserved in the end for her cousin Maria.