Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's least-loved novel. Russell Brand's sentence just made it her most relevant

Russell Brand was sentenced on November 9 at Southwark Crown Court to 10 years and six months for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others, offenses spanning 2004 to 2009. Judge Joel Bennathan told him he had "become a sexual predator" as his fame grew — and then said the quiet part about how he got away with it for so long: "You were clever – and in many people's eyes, funny and charismatic."

Clever, funny, charismatic, and a predator the people around him kept forgiving. Jane Austen published that exact character study in 1814. His name is Henry Crawford, he is the charming villain of Mansfield Park, and while Brand's trial ran, readers on r/janeausten were rereading the novel and finding it almost unbearably current.

The Crawford method

Crawford arrives at Mansfield Park rich, witty, and bored, and starts flirting with both Bertram sisters at once — one of them already engaged. He plays Maria and Julia against each other for sport, wrecks their trust in each other, and the household's men notice nothing. One reader in the thread laid out the mechanism:

"The way he sets Maria and Julia against each other, destroying their mutual trust and isolating them from each other, that was also completely overlooked by the men in the group. The only one who at least partially realized what's going on was Fanny."

— a commenter on r/janeausten

That's the novel's real horror: not what Crawford does, but how cheaply he's forgiven. When he proposes to Fanny Price — the poor niece, the only person who has watched him operate — her entire family treats her refusal as ingratitude bordering on madness. Sir Thomas, the moral authority of the book, effectively exiles her to Portsmouth for saying no to a charming man with money.

Austen then does something almost no romance writer does: she proves Fanny right. Crawford runs off with the now-married Maria, detonates her life, and walks away with his reputation lightly singed while the woman is ruined. The author handed readers the receipts two centuries before anyone said "believe women."

The judge called Brand "funny and charismatic" in the same breath as "sexual predator." Austen needed one novel to explain that those two clauses belong together.

Why we never liked this book

Mansfield Park has spent two hundred years as the Austen novel people skip, and Fanny as the heroine people call a prude — too quiet, too judgmental, no fun at parties. Readers keep wishing she'd said yes to the fun one. The thread named the reason we feel that way:

"I think it is because we have in some ways been conditioned to enjoy the idea of the 'reformed rake' in fiction. Even in Jane Austen's time, it was already a well-known plot point."

— a commenter on r/janeausten

That conditioning is exactly what charm like Crawford's — and, per four women and a jury, like Brand's — runs on. The rake reforms in fiction; in the real world he gets a BBC radio show. Fanny Price's superpower, the thing readers resented her for, is that she is immune to the performance. She watches what the charming man does instead of enjoying what he says, which is the skill an entire culture spent the post-#MeToo decade painfully learning.

Don't miss: Will Russell Brand ever get out? His 10-year sentence covers only the first trial

So this is the week to reread the Austen novel nobody loves. Not because it predicted one comedian, but because it's a 212-year-old field guide to the type — and because every adaptation meeting that passed on Mansfield Park for being "unlikable" now has to explain why its heroine was the only one who saw the whole thing coming.

Previously we wrote: Read The Remarried Empress novel ending before Disney+ changes it in 10 episodes