“Sørbø raises the possibility that the greatest irony in Mansfield Park is that Fanny marries the wrong guy after all.
This is great stuff, an interpretation that explains why so many readers are dissatisfied with the novel. […] Its value lies in Sørbø’s close reading, which enables new insights about the texts she considers. More can be learned about Austen, irony, and film after all.” - Nora Nachumi, Stern College / Yeshiva University, in: JASNA News 31.3 (2015), pp. 21

“At the October meeting, where we reprised the Montreal AGM, I enthused about the presentation by Norwegian scholar Marie Sørbø, and especially about her book Irony and Idyll [….] Sørbø’s thesis is that Jane Austen is all irony all the time, and that adaptors largely miss that, and thus, what they give us is ‘idylls’ – idealized stories set in an exotic time and place.“
“ ‘Women in Love’ […] Sørbø suggested would be an appropriate alternate title for Mansfield Park. […] This is Jane Austen poking a stick at the conventional love story of her era […].”
-Elspeth Flood in Muse @ Musings, Newsletter of Jane Austen Society of North America Vancouver Region, No 121, February 2015, p.3