Jane Austen Environment and Nature

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Jane AustenEnvironment and Nature
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Contents
The Animal Question and Women 3
Jane Austen and Animals byBarbara K. Seeber
The Potential of Death by Landscape 20

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen
by Barbara Britton Wenner
3 or 4 Families in a Country Village, 38

or Naturalists, Novelists, Empiricists,
and Serendipidists
Jane Austen & Charles Darwin byPeter W. Graham
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Chapter 1
The Animal Question and Women
Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.

(Letters 336)
William Hogarths The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) figures prominently in

cultural histories of the humananimal relationship in the eighteenth century. In
Kathryn Shevelows For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection
Movement, Hogarths engravings mark a point of transition, the moment at
which earlier, scattered, individual expressions of concern for the abuse of animals
began to coalesce into a large collectivity (146). Hogarth spelled out his didactic
intention in the Autobiographical Notes:
The four stages of cruelty, were done in hopes of preventing in some degree
that cruel treatment of poor Animals which makes the streets of London more
disagreeable to the human mind, than any thing what ever, the very describing
of which gives pain. it could not be done in too strong a manner, as the most
stony hearts were meant to be affected by them. (Qtd. in Engravings by Hogarth
n.pag.)
The narrative charts Tom Neros progression from torturing animals as a boy
(The First Stage) to abusing animals as an adult in his work as a coachman
(The Second Stage) to thieving and murder (Cruelty in Perfection). The final
engraving, Cruelty Rewarded, focuses on Tom Neros executed body as the
object of medical dissection. Scalpels and knives, variations of the instruments
of torture used on animals in the first and second engravings, are now turned on
him. And, in a reversal of the humananimal hierarchy, a human body becomes
meat as a dog feasts on Tom Neros heart. Given the texts emphasis on the
protagonists corruption, this latter reversal seems more of a comment on Toms
brutishness rather than a leveling of the humananimal hierarchy. Hogarths series
is exemplary of the eighteenth-century moralist argument for humans indirect
obligation to animals, since it vividly suggests that cruelty to animals leads to
cruelty to humans. While animals are similar to humans in their sentiencethe
describing of the Creatures pain in turn gives painHogarths primary
focus is on the human agents and the debasement of their humanity. The class
dimensions of Hogarths print have received much commentary. The male figure
who seeks to intervene in the animal abuse in the first engraving is markedly
middle-class in opposition to Tom Nero and the other participants in cruelty.1
1
Robert Malcolmson, among others, has argued that anti-cruelty discourses mask
class politics. However, the continuity of the modern humane movement with seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century thought on the ethics of human relationships with animals should not
3
Jane Austen and Animals
However, as Shevelow argues, Although those who physically perpetrate the acts
depicted in the first and second stages are all members of the laboring classes, the
upper classes share culpability for the violence on their behalf (131). Members of
the professional classes overcrowd Tom Neros hackney coach, presumably to save
money, without regard for the consequencesthe excessive burden on the horse,
who, subdud by Labour, collapses, and is then subjected to his cruel Masters
rage. Similarly, while the tender Lamb, already faint from exhaustion, dies
beneath the Blows of an inhuman Wretch, its death implicates the much larger
system of food production. And in the final engraving Hogarth expands the scope
of cruelty to the state-sanctioned violence of the executioner and the surgeons
(Shevelow 139). Cruelty pervades and implicates the lower as well as the upper
ranks of society in Hogarths engravings.
Of particular interest to this study is that Tom Neros progression of cruelty
from animal to human victims takes a gendered form. Tom murders his pregnant
girlfriend; the maid was betrayd into lawless Love and soon Crime to Crime
succeeds: she steals from her Mistress for her lover, who then kills her. Eighteenth-
century women writers developed the connections between violence towards
animals and violence towards women. For example, in Mary Wollstonecrafts The
Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, the heroines brother advances along lines similar
to those in Hogarths didactic tale: from tormenting insects and animals
[he] became the despot of his brothers, and still more of his sisters (1:124). In
Frances Burneys Camilla, a novel to which Jane Austen subscribed, the heroine
is confronted with the spectacle of monkeys who, with the aid of fierce blows
(429), are trained to play music, and bullfinches who are similarly beaten into
learn[ing](492). When Camilla, pained by the bullfinch keepers sever[ity],
inquired by what means he had obtained such authority, the man with a
significant wag of the head, brutally answered: By the true old way, Miss; I licks
him. everythings the better for a little beating, as I tells my wife (492). The
parallel between the treatment of animals and women is made explicit, and the
animal abuse sheds disturbing light on the heroines painful education plot. Austen
was aware of animal welfare discourses and, I argue, drew on them in her work.
The status of animals, or the Animal Question, to use Paola Cavalieris
coinage, was the subject of rigorous scientific, philosophical, and political debate
during Austens lifetime. Discussions of animals in cultural history, contemporary
theory, and literary criticism locate in the eighteenth century a significant shift in
the humananimal relationship. The founding of animal protection organizations
such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 (which
became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840) and,
closer to our own day, the Great Ape Project in 1993 are connected to the animal
be forgotten (Maehle 100). Similarly, literary critic David Perkins states, No important
argument has yet been adduced, on the question of right conduct toward animals, that was
not already urged in the eighteenth century (Cowpers Hares 58). Diana Donald (224)
also challenges the argument that anti-cruelty discourses are class politics in disguise, as
does Hilda Kean (3132, 36).
4
welfare and rights movements of the eighteenth century and to the early steps
towards legal protection of animals that took place during this time.2 In 1800 and
1802 William Wilberforce put forth anti-bullbaiting bills, both defeated in the
House of Commons, while 1809 saw the introduction of an anti-cruelty bill by
Lord Erskine in the House of Lords, the first of its kind ever to be debated in
any Western legislature (Kenyon-Jones 79). Given that Erskines address was
widely reported in the press and subsequently published as a pamphlet (Kenyon-
Jones 80), we may assume that Austen would have read or heard about it. While
Erskine was defeated, and it took until 1822 for the passing of the Martins Act,
the first anti-cruelty bill (specifically to Prevent Cruel and Improper Treatment of
Cattle), its ultimate success is inseparable from the history of animal welfare and
rights in the eighteenth century.3
The seventeenth-century philosopher Ren Descartess categorization of
animals as machines, without souls or reasoning and feeling capacities and, hence,
exempt from claims to moral consideration, was challenged on a number of fronts
in the eighteenth century.4 For example, Richard Dean, in An Essay on the Future
Life of Brutes. Introduced with Observations upon Evil, its Nature and Origin
(1768), sought to confute De Carte and the Absurdity of the Doctrine, which
teaches that Brutes are unintelligent Machines (2:xixxx): dumb Animals are
liable to Infelicity as well as Men: they have their Pains and Sicknesses, suffer
many Sorrows from internal Disorders, and many Pangs from external Injuries,
and finally languish, decay, and die as he himself does (1:23). Man should
consider, that as Brutes have Sensibility, they are capable of Pain, feel every
Bang, and Cut, and Stab, as much as he himself does, some of them perhaps more
(2:104). Dean also argues for animal souls: Certain it is, that a future Life of
Brutes cannot be absolutely denied, without impeaching the Attributes of God.
It reflects upon his Goodness, to suppose that he subjects to Pains, and Sorrows,
such a Number of Beings, whom he never designs to beatify (2:73).5 Arguments
2
The Great Ape Project seeks to establish a United Nations Declaration granting
nonhuman great apes the status of individuals, with basic legal rights of life, liberty, and
freedom from torture. Legal rights for great apes have been successfully advanced in Spain
(2008). See similar advocacy for whales and dolphins in the 2010 Declaration of Rights for
Cetaceans.
3
See Chapter 3 in Kenyon-Joness Kindred Brutes for a detailed account, and also
Hilda Keans Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800.
4
There are excellent overviews of this history by Shevelow, Keith Thomas, Andreas
Holger Maehle, Aaron Garrett, and John Simons.
5
John Hildrop, in Free Thoughts upon the Brute Creation (174243), also argued
for animal souls and kindness to animals. In contrast, Humphrey Primatt contended that
animals had a right to just treatment on earth because they were barred from the justice of
the afterlife: as we have no authority to declare, and no testimony from heaven to assure
us, that there is a state of recompence for suffering Brutality, we will suppose there is
none; and from this very supposition, we rationally infer that cruelty to a brute is an injury
irreparable (4243).
5
for animal souls, animal sentience, and animal language were advanced, all with
important implications for the question of the ethical treatment of animals, ranging
from indirect to direct obligation to animals. Andreas Holger Maehle summarizes
this debate: Either indirect obligations towards animals were constructed on
the basis of direct duties to God, to other human beings or to oneself; or animal
rights were conceded by analogy to human rights, the consequence being direct
obligations towards animals. Whereas the latter argument appeared after 1750, the
former can be traced back to the early eighteenth century (91).
Harriet Ritvo reminds us that Wherever we look in nineteenth-century British
culture the role of animals appears not only multiple but contested. the search
for a single generalization or a single unfolding narrative may be intrinsically
misguided (Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain 122). It is beyond the scope
of this study to do justice to the complex history of the humananimal relationship.
My aim here is to pursue two interrelated strands in this historysentience as the
basis for direct ethical obligation to animals and the connections drawn between
cruelty to animals and cruelty to humansand to read Jane Austen within this
context. Markman Ellis writes, Just as abolitionists sought to reposition Africans
as thinking and feeling people, the animal-cruelty campaigners sought to refigure
the cultural construction of brute creation, showing them to be not things but
animals possessed with feeling and thus endowed with certain rights (107). I
argue that Austens novels resonate with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century discourses about animals as thinking, feeling beings and with discourses
which connect the animal question to abolitionism and feminism. Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park is neglected and abused, treated without feeling by her family.
All of Austens heroines, even those whose immediate contexts are more loving,
find themselves perilously close to the status of animals in a culture which denied
women citizenship, and the novels explore the pain of their subordination and
vindicate their feeling, thinking natures. Focusing on discourses about animals, I
seek to contribute to the discussion of Austen as engaged with the revolutionary
politics of her time. Christine Kenyon-Jones argues that at the end of the
eighteenth century, the issue of animal cruelty became associated with questions
of rights and citizenship: Since animals could be seen to be metonymically or
synecdochically linked to oppressed human groups, they were drawn into the
debate, and the continuum of better treatment and rights was also, to some extent,
applied to them (40).
Eighteenth-century discourses of animal welfare and rights emphasized animal
sentience. We see this clearly in Humphrey Primatt, one of the first to present
an alternative to the concept of a merely indirect obligation towards animals
(Maehle 94). In A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute
Animals (first published in 1776 and reprinted in the 1820s), he argues that a
man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a
beast has not the mental powers of a man (12). He dethrones reason as the central
determinant of humananimal relations, and, instead, emphasizes the commonality
of sentience: Pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or on beast (7). The
ability to feel pain entitles animals to FOOD, REST, and TENDER USAGE
6
(147), but not only their necessary Wants, and what is absolutely their Demand on
the principles of strict Justice, but also their Ease and Comfort, and what they have
a reasonable and equitable Claim to, on the principles of Mercy and Compassion
(202). Animals, according to Primatt, have a right to Happiness (202).6 Similarly,
Thomas Youngs An Essay on Humanity to Animals (1798) emphasizes that
animals are endued with a capability of perceiving pleasure and pain (8). The
most frequently invoked challenge to the Cartesian mind-body and humananimal
duality is that of Jeremy Bentham in his 1789 Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation: a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more
rational, as well as a more conversible animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or
even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the
question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? (283).
Some eighteenth-century writers on the ethical treatment of animals extend their
arguments to vegetarianism. Joseph Ritson, in An Essay on Abstinence from Animal
Food as a Moral Duty (1802), links the cruelty of rural sport to meat consumption:
the prior is a prejudice and a custom (97, 220), just as animal food [is] not
natural to man (41). John Oswalds The Cry of Nature; Or, An Appeal to Mercy
and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (1791) also includes a case for
vegetarianism alongside a denunciation of rural sport. These texts provided ways
of showing how human behaviour could be mediated through temperance and non-
violence (Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste 41).
In these texts, animal suffering matters in and of itself, but is also seen as
intersecting with other forms of oppression. Primatt protests human slavery
alongside animal suffering: the white man (notwithstanding the barbarity of
custom and prejudice) can have no right to enslave and tyrannize over a black
man (11). Slavery is also included by George Nicholson (On the Primeval Diet
223) and John Lawrence in A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses and
on the Moral Duties of Men towards the Brute Creation (127). The title page of
The Cry of Nature announces its author, John Oswald, as a Member of the Club
des Jacobines, aligning the animal cause with other revolutionary causes. And
Ritson links cruelty to animals to social hierarchies:
Man, who is every-where a tyrant or a slave, delights to inflict on each sensible

being within his power the treatment he receives from his own superiors: as the
negro revenges the cruelty of his owner upon the innocent dog. Every animal,
wild or tame, of which he becomes the possessor, is his property, his prisoner,
his slave; to be treated with caprice and cruelty, and put to death at his pleasure.
(100)
6
Primatts text contravenes the claim that all anti-cruelty discourses are more about
social regulation and effective labour discipline (Malcolmson 89). Primatt explicitly
draws attention to cruelty of every class and denomination (77): his examples include
sport associated with the lower classes (cockfighting and bullbaiting) as well as the sport of
the upper classes (to chace a Stag, to hunt a Fox, or course a Hare), the mistreatment of
horses, and upper-class culinary privileges (to roast a Lobster, or to crimp a Fish) (75).
See footnote 1.
7
Thomas Young, in An Essay on Humanity to Animals (1798), writes that cruelty to

animals tends to render those who practise it, cruel towards their own species:
humanity towards animals has an important connection with humanity towards
mankind (3). He situates animal welfare alongside other claims for social justice,
the sufferings of the prisoner the condition of the poor [and] the abolition
of the slave trade (2).
While these writers draw connections between the treatment of animals and
other systems of oppression, they tend to overlook womens subordination.
Oswald hope[s] for the day when the growing sentiment of peace and good-
will towards men will also embrace, in a wide circle of benevolence, the lower
orders of life (ii), but the dawn he envisions does not bring gender equality. The
frontispiece engraving to The Cry of Nature shows a deer mourning a fawn while
Nature, in young and naked female form, averts her eyes in sorrow: The butchers
knife hath laid low the delight of a fond dam & the darling of Nature is now
stretched in gore upon the ground. The speaker has listen[ed] to the plea[s]
(38) of the mother of every living thing (44), and mediates her appeal to the
reader. Nefarious science with ruffian violence interrogate[s] trembling nature;
plunge[s] into her maternal bosom the butcher knife (Oswald 33), and Mother
Nature is dependent on male intervention to save her. Moreover, while Oswald
links carnivorism to the class hierarchy, his vegetarianism does not challenge the
gender hierarchy. Nature is an eroticized temptress and offers herself for male
consumption:
And innocently mayest thou indulge the desires which Nature so potently
provokes; for see! the trees are overcharged with fruit; the bending branches
seem to supplicate for relief; the mature orange, the ripe apple, the mellow
peach invoke thee, as it were, to save them from falling to the ground, from
dropping into corruption. They will smile in thy hand; and, blooming as the rosy
witchcraft of thy bride, they will sue thee to press them to thy lip; in thy mouth
they will melt not inferior the famed ambrosia of the gods. (2223)
Conventional gender roles also are at work in John Frank Newtons The Return to
Nature, as evident in the domestic scene he sketches to dramatize carnivorisms
fateful consequences of illness and death:
Recently has he lost his best companion; the spotless mother of his children;
her who was the repository of his cares and his secrets; who at each return to
his threshold found no words but kind ones for him. Has she then suddenly
disappeared, who so late was the cheerful and affectionate centre around which
the whole family revolved; and who has left the question forever undecided
whether she contributed more largely to the comfort and pleasure of the father,
or of the children. (153)
For Newton, the Return to Nature entails a return to a clearly delineated gender
system:
8
The male broad-shouldered, dignified, erect; his muscles every where strongly
pronounced; his sinewy form gradually lessening from the shoulders to the feet;
in every limb, vigour and elasticity. The woman more than beautiful; her eyes
sparkling with mirth, or brimming with sweetness; happy in her own existence,
and increasing the happiness of all around her. (14748)
Similarly, in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, liberty from social prejudice

and a return to natural principles, including ethical concern for animals, does not
translate into equality of men and women. Rather, it is part of the order of nature
that the woman obey the man (Emile 407) and, in accordance with nature, the
animal kingdom reflects the gender system. For example, Rousseau supports his
point that woman is by nature sexually coy: I have already noticed that affected
and provocative refusals are common to almost all females, even among animals,
even when they are most disposed to give themselves. One has to have never
observed their wiles not to agree with this (Emile 359). Similarly, male sexual
jealousy appears to depend so closely on nature that it is hard to believe that it
does not come from it. And the example of the animals, several of whom are jealous
to the point of fury, seems unanswerably to establish that it does come from nature.
Is it mens opinion which teaches cocks to tear one another apart and bulls to fight
to the death? (Emile 429). While animal welfare writers focus on human agents
shaping blood sports, Rousseau here recruits sport into the service of the gender
system. This is surprising since, in Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of
Inequality Among Men, Rousseaus ethical system does include animals: since
[animals] share to some extent in our nature by virtue of the sentient quality with
which they are endowed, one will judge that they should also participate in natural
right, and that man is subject to some sort of duties towards them (36). Rod
Preece credits Rousseau as one of the leading voices on behalf of animals in the
Enlightenment period. However, Rousseaus philosophy, as Nathaniel Wolloch
emphasizes, prescribes limits to duties towards nonhuman beings. According to
Rousseau, animals have the right not to be needlessly mistreated (Discourse
36), except in the legitimate instance where, if [mans] preservation being
involved, he is obliged to give preference to himself (Discourse 35). Legitimacy
and need are not clearly defined and, hence, as Tristram Stuart comments, it is
difficult to see where exactly Rousseau thought peoples compassion ought to
outweigh their self-interest (199). For example, he did not propose a consistent
vegetarianism (even though he theorized meat-eating as unnatural),7 nor did he
develop a consistent position on hunting. In fact, in Emile or On Education, he
recommends it (for men) as a distraction from sexual passion:
Emile has everything needed to succeed at it. He is robust, adroit, patient,

indefatigable . He will lose in itat least for a timethe dangerous
7
For a comprehensive discussion of vegetarianism in Rousseau, see David Boonin-
Vail and Chapter 15 in Stuarts The Bloodless Revolution. For the influence of Rousseau on
educational writings for children, see Kenyon-Jones, pp. 5365.
9
inclinations born of softness. The hunt hardens the heart as well as the body .
I do not want Emiles whole youth to be spent in killing animals, and I do not
even pretend to justify in every respect this ferocious passion. It is enough for
me that it serves to suspend a more dangerous passion. (32021)
This passage, in particular, exemplifies Wollochs point that for Rousseau,

sensitivity to animal suffering was a concomitant of the weak sex (297).
Rousseaus philosophy of gender is most vividly cast in Emile or On
Education, which sets out in detail that man and woman ought not to have the
same education (363). The title characters female counterpart, Sophie, is raised
only to become a wife and mother:
the whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be

useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when
young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make
their lives agreeable and sweetthese are the duties of women at all times, and
they ought to be taught from childhood. (365)
Rousseau roots this gendered education in the law of nature: In the union of
the sexes each contributes equally to the common aim, but not in the same way.
From this diversity arises the first assignable difference in the moral relations of
the two sexes. One ought to be active and strong, the other passive and weak
(358). Woman is made to yield to man and to endure even his injustice. You
will never reduce young boys to the same point. The inner sentiment in them
rises and revolts against injustice. Nature did not constitute them to tolerate it
(396). Womans proper purpose is to produce children (362). Rousseau sees
maternity as the determining factor of womens lives and character (the timidity
of women is another instinct of nature against the double risk they run during their
pregnancy [362]):
The female is female her whole life or at least during her whole youth. Everything
constantly recalls her sex to her; and, to fulfill its functions well, she needs a
constitution which corresponds to it. She needs care during her pregnancy; she
needs rest at the time of childbirth; she needs a soft and sedentary life to suckle
her children; she needs patience and gentleness, a zeal and an affection that
nothing can rebuff in order to raise her children. She serves as the link between
them and their father. (361)
As Susan Moller Okin argues, Rousseau defines womans nature, unlike mans,
in terms of her functionthat is, her sexual and procreative purpose in life .
Womans function is seen as physical and sensual, whereas mans potential is seen
as creative and intellectual (99100). Given womens functional role, they are
excluded from citizenship.
The educational plan set out in Emile, published within a month of The
Social Contract, supports its limiting of citizenship to men. The Social Contract
excluded women from citizenship and consigned them emphatically to private
10
life (Canovan 84) on the basis of nature. Womens role in Rousseaus envisaged
republic was to be subordinate to men: as Okin writes, It was only through
their domestic influence on their husbands, exerted through making full use of the
latters feelings for them, that women were to have any power in Rousseaus ideal
republic. No contract-based civic equality was to replace the natural differences
bestowed upon women (Okin 145). Rousseau never envisaged that women
should be enfranchised citizens whose voices contribute to the formulation of the
general will (Okin 144). In Rousseaus view, the nonparticipation of women is
not ideological; rather, women are incapable of participation. Her childbearing role
precludes participation in the public world and, secondly, the quest of abstract and
speculative truths, principles, and axioms in the sciences, for everything that tends
to generalize ideas, is not within the competence of women. All their studies ought
to be related to practice. It is for them to apply the principles man has found, and to
make the observations which lead man to the establishment of principles (Emile
386).8 While Rousseau is known for his advocacy of the natural over the social,
his notion of citizenship is based on a (masculine) transcendence of the personal,
the material, and the emotional realms. Rousseau exemplifies the distinction
Kenyon-Jones notes
in the liberal, republican ideology of the eighteenth century between property-

holding, politically-participating, male citizens, with both the ability to bear
arms and the capacity to own land and thus to have a physical stake in the
welfare of the state, and the groups of subjects who mediated between the citizen
and nature, providing their material needs. These latter groupswho shared to
a greater or lesser degree in a feminized representation of nature and who were
therefore characterized ambivalently were women, the working classes, and
colonized races. (156)
Enlightenment feminists interrogated this inscription of sexual difference and

the subordination of women as part of nature. Catharine Macaulay and Mary
Wollstonecraft challenged what they perceived as a false system of education
8
Without purporting to recuperate all of Rousseaus ideas for feminism, Joel
Schwartz argues that there are feminist elements within his thought (9). Rousseau
also emphasizes the dependence of men upon women (3) and grants the importance of
womens influence over men, and through this influence, over civil society and the political
world (5). Lynda Lange writes that in Rousseau Familial, domestic, and sexual practices
were brought under the same type of scrutiny as more commonly considered questions
in modern political philosophy. This was a basic theoretical move that was necessary for
feminist political philosophy to be possible (2). Lange does add, arguably, this gives
Rousseau too much credit (7). Rousseau has received a very divided reception among
feminists, as is evident in the essay collection Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Some critics suggest the feminist potential of his work, while others argue that
it subordinates women. A number of essays in the collection explore the ambiguities and
paradoxes which make Rousseaus work more hospitable to contemporary thinking about
gender and sexuality.
11
consider[ing] females rather as women than human creatures (5:73), such as

the one set out by Rousseau.9 And, as we will see, their challenge of womans so-
called nature has important implications for the humananimal hierarchy.
Enlightenment feminists protested that womens so-called nature is, rather,
a product of education. Catharine Macaulay, in Letters on Education, writes: all
those vices and imperfections which have been generally regarded as inseparable
from the female character, do not in any manner proceed from sexual causes, but
are entirely the effects of situation and education (202). Claims about womens
innate nature serve to legitimize womens subordination. Macaulay speaks of
womens inferiority as a consequence of mans prejudice (49). In Vindication of
the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, an enthusiastic reader of Macaulays
treatise, also declared that the state of women is anything but natural: I am
unable to comprehend what either [Dr. Gregory] or Rousseau mean, when they
frequently use this indefinite term (5:97). Wollstonecraft expounds the pernicious
effects of this indefinite term (natural sexual difference) and argues that women
are made to be weak and kept in a state of perpetual childhood (5:75). Given
that Rousseau repeatedly speaks of the importance of womens docility and
gentleness (Emile 370), Wollstonecraft concludes that women are to be raised
as gentle, domestic brutes (5:89). In effect, women are excluded from humanity,
Wollstonecraft argues: they are treated as a kind of subordinate being, and not
as part of the human species (5:73). In response, she adopts the firm tone of
humanity and repeatedly speaks of the whole human race (5:65). Both Macaulay
and Wollstonecraft argued for co-education as part of their overall argument that
womens subordination is ideological, not natural.
Recognizing that the disenfranchisement of women was legitimized by their
alleged closeness to nature, rather than culture, Enlightenment feminist texts insist
on womens rational capacity: women are not creatures of the body, emotion,
and instinct; like men, they are rational creatures (Wollstonecraft 5:75). Austen
clearly draws on this argument in her novels. Responding to the persistent Mr.
Collinss marriage proposal, Elizabeth Bennet entreats him, consider me a
rational creature speaking the truth from her heart (P&P 122). And Mrs. Croft
objects to her brothers notion that women belong at home, not on ships: I hate
to hear you talking so, like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies,
instead of rational creatures (P 75). In Emma, Mrs. Elton speaks of possessing
the discretion of a minister of state (495), but her avenues of expression are
woefully limited. Mrs. Elton attempts to make the best of her small lot: her
husband is engaged from morning to night with magistrates, and overseers, and
churchwardens, and she tells him, rather you than I.I do not know what would
become of my crayons and my instrument, if I had half so many applicants (497).
But it is clear that Mrs. Eltons life lacks purpose and, with her pearls and lace,
Austen colors her like the accomplished ladies of Wollstonecrafts Vindication
9
For arguments linking Wollstonecraft and Macaulay, see Devoney Looser (Those
Historical Laurels), Bridget Hill, and Catherine Gardner.
12
of the Rights of Woman who, confined in cages like the feathered race, have
nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch
to perch (5:125).
For Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, what came to be termed the Woman Question
was connected to the Animal Question. Their arguments for gender equality and
co-education, while emphasizing womens rational capacity, also proposed better
treatment of animals. They recognized that the way animals were treated within
patriarchy was connected to the way women were treated; to protest the oppression
of women was to protest the other. As ecofeminist theorist Val Plumwood argues,
in the Western tradition,
the human essence is often seen as lying in maximizing control over the natural
sphere (both within and without) and in qualities such as rationality, freedom,
and transcendence of the material sphere. These qualities are also identified
as masculine, and hence the oppositional model of the human coincides or
converges with a masculine model, in which the characteristics attributed are
those of the masculine ideal. (17)
The treatment of animals is thus an integral part of Macaulays argument about

womens education: If brutes were to draw a character of man do you think they
would call him a benevolent being? No; their representations would be somewhat
of the same kind as the fabled furies and other infernals in ancient mythology
(121). Macaulay, as we have seen, speaks of womens subordination as mans
prejudice (49). She also characterizes humans attitudes to animals in these
terms. Already in the first letter Macaulay recasts the inferiority of animals as the
fond prejudices and pride of our species (1). Macaulay uses the same language as
animal welfare and rights texts, which frequently denaturalize human attitudes to
animals as a form of prejudice. For example, George Nicholsons On the Primeval
Diet of Man; Arguments in Favour of Vegetable Food; On Mans Conduct to
Animals (1801) casts human superiority to animals as deep-rooted prejudices
(2). Similarly, Lawrence speaks of human pride, prejudice, and cruelty (1:78).
Macaulay examines the ideological underpinnings of human violence towards
animals: There are very few of the insect or reptile tribes which belong to this
country, that can be said to be personally injurious to man; yet we are brought up
with such prejudices, that they never escape our violence whenever they come
within our reach (122). This example is particularly striking, as she includes
species which continue to receive little moral consideration. Her program for early
childhood education advocates pet-keeping as a way of countering received ideas
about animals: by the knowledge [children] will thus acquire of brute nature, they
will be cured of prejudices founded on ignorance, and in the vanity and conceit of
man (125). Just as the gender system is culturally produced and should be subject
to rational interrogation, so is the humananimal system. Macaulay asks for more
than mercy to animals, for mercy, after all, is the prerogative of those in power.
Instead, she argues for a more fundamental shift in how humans think of and treat
13
animals, including legal protection.10 In common with writers such as Primatt and
Oswald, Macaulay connects the abuse of power which the brute creation suffer
from our hands (268) to other systems of oppression, such as slavery (190), and,
going beyond Primatt and Oswald, she includes patriarchy in her analysis.
Macaulay identifies virtue with sympathy; our ability to imagine ourselves
in someone elses plight, to sympathize with them, leads us to the ethical value
of equity, that is, to not impose our will on others: it was the movements of
sympathy which first inclined man to a forbearance of his own gratifications, in
respect to the feelings of his fellow creatures; and his reason soon approved the
dictates of his inclination (275). In this ethical system, animals matter:
In order to impress the more strongly on the peoples minds the superiority of
benevolence, to that of any other virtue; No statue, bust, or monument, should be
permitted a place in the church, but of those citizens who have been especially
useful in mitigating the woes attendant on animal life; or who have been the
authors of any invention, by which the happiness of man, or brute, may be
rationally improved. (336)
Macaulays benevolence is put to political work; she develops what Sylvia

Bowerbank calls a radicalized concept of compassion (5).
The importance of compassion to animals also is consistently addressed
in Wollstonecrafts educational writings.11 In Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters (1787), Wollstonecraft observes that children are raised to think man
the only thing of consequence in the creation, and she counters that children
should be led to take an interest in [animals] welfare and occupations (4:44).
The first three chapters of Original Stories from Real Life; With Conversations,
Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness
(1788) are titled The Treatment of Animals, and they ground ethics in the shared
sentience of humans and animals. Mrs. Mason defines Goodness as first, to
avoid hurting any thing; and then, to contrive to give as much pleasure as you
can (4:368). The narrative of education is the inverse of Hogarths. The female
pupils, Mary and Caroline, mature from running eagerly after some insects to
destroy them (4:367) to nursing wounded birds shot at by an idle boy (4:368):
Look at it [a wounded bird] do you not see [that] it suffers as much, and more
than you did when you had the small-pox, [when] you were so tenderly nursed
(4:369). Moreover, the emotional lives of animals, their ability to feel affection,
10
Were government to act on so liberal a sentiment of benevolence, as to take under
the protection of law the happiness of the brute species, so far as to punish in offenders
that rigorous, that barbarous treatment they meet with in the course of their useful services,
would it not tend to encrease sympathy (Macaulay 277). Lawrence also makes the case
for legal protection: Experience plainly demonstrates the inefficacy of mere morality to
prevent aggression, and the necessity of coercive laws for the security of rights (1:123).
11
For a full discussion of Wollstonecrafts views on animals, see my essay in Animal
Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World.
14
are recognized: if you take away their young, it almost kills them (4:373).
Original Stories, as Bowerbank argues, is designed to stimulate relational ways
of thinking (152), and the animal is granted status as a feeling subject requiring
ethical consideration (149). Similarly, in Lessons (1798), published posthumously
by William Godwin, the mother explains to her child:
Oh! the poor puppy has tumbled off the stool. Run and stroke him. Put a little
milk in a saucer to comfort him . You are wiser than the dog, you must help
him. The dog will love you for it, and run after you. I feed you and take care of
you: you love me and follow me for it. When the book fell down on your foot, it
gave you great pain. The poor dog felt the same pain just now. (4:473)
The child is wiser than the dog, but the experiences of pain and love cross
species lines. And in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argues
that Humanity to animals should be particularly inculcated as a part of national
education (5:243):
habitual cruelty is first caught at school, where it is one of the rare sports of the
boys to torment the miserable brutes that fall in their way. The transition, as
they grow up, from barbarity to brutes to domestic tyranny over wives, children,
and servants, is very easy. Justice, or even benevolence, will not be a powerful
spring of action unless it extend to the whole creation; nay, I believe that it may
be delivered as an axiom, that those who can see pain, unmoved, will soon learn
to inflict it. (5:244)
George Nicholson, in The Primeval Diet of Man, noted this passage with approval:
Mrs. Wollstonecraft humanely observes that tenderness to animals should
be particularly inculcated as a part of national education (216). It is clear that
Wollstonecraft participated in eighteenth-century discussions of animal welfare
and rights, and she was recognized as doing so by her contemporaries. As in the
case of Macaulay, compassion to animals is radicalized (Bowerbank 159). The
subjugation of animals is paradigmatic of oppression in general, and the lesson of
kindness to animals carries with it a lesson about social justice.
Wollstonecrafts fiction dramatizes the connections between the human
animal hierarchy and other social hierarchies. Alison Sulloway notes that feminist
writers used metaphors of morally maimed, blinded, or fettered women; of
creatures fluttering in vain, like caged birds (62). Wollstonecrafts The Wrongs
of Woman, or Maria offers a particularly rich example. Its heroine describes
herself as a bird caught in a trap, and caged for life (1:138) and hunted, like
an infected beast (1:165). The novel treats the suffering of women across class
lines. Jemima, the laboring-class servant with whom the imprisoned upper-class
Maria forms a friendship, tells her life story as one of being treated like a creature
of another species (1:108). Illegitimate, orphaned, and poor, Jemima suffered a
childhood of abuse: It seemed indeed the privilege of their superior nature to kick
me about, like the dog or cat. If I were attentive, I was called fawning, if refractory,
an obstinate mule, and like a mule I received their censure on my loaded back
15
(1:109); I was the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute, who must bear
all (1:10910). These tropes open up a space in which the reader is encouraged
to critique not only the abuse of women across class lines but also the abuse of
animals. Since cruelty to animals paves the way for cruelty to humans, and since
animals, like humans, are sentient beings (both points repeatedly made in the early
educational writings), the treatment of animals is of ethical and political import in
Wollstonecraft. The novel connects the ideologies that oppress along the gender,
class, and species lines, and interrogates perversions of the understanding, which
systematize oppression (1:88). The role of the animal is crucial in the systemizing
of oppression. Because Jemima is view[ed] as a creature of another species
(1:111), she is treated cruelly and excluded from moral consideration.
We know that Austen was familiar with the tradition of Enlightenment
feminism.12 Thus, she would have encountered texts which included the animal
question alongside feminism. This study demonstrates that Austen likened
womens state in patriarchy to that of animals, whether as hunted prey or as pets.
The marriage plot, often seen as defining Austens oeuvre, also carries significant
anxiety. Mary Crawford calls marriage a manoeuvring business (MP 53), a
perspective not wholly rejected by her author. The novels conclusions often are
perfunctory, and self-consciously drawing attention to their artifice, they reflect
Austens ambivalence towards marriage. At the end of Northanger Abbey, the bells
rang and every body smiled (261). The narrator of Emma is similarly circumspect:
She spoke then, on being so entreated.What did she say?Just what she ought,
of course. A lady always does (470). Emma jokes that she will call Mr. Knightley
once by [his] Christian name in the building in which N. takes M. for better,
for worse (505), but her comment also irreverently suggests the formulaic quality
of the marriage plot. The marriage closure does bring her heroines degrees of
economic security and social integration, but it compromises their liberty. In
Sanditon, Lady Denham boasts, I do not think I was ever over-reached in my
life; and that is a good deal for a woman to say that has been married twice
(LM 178). Austen skillfully negotiated a variety of expectations and audiences
in her novels, and they continue to appeal to a range of communities of readers.
Her marriage plots enjoy the status of romances, but also sustain contrapuntal
readings, particularly by feminist and queer critics. In the latter school, Austens
marriage plots are far from tidy. Deborah Kaplan has argued that Austens work
can be characterized by divided loyalties to the culture of the gentry and to
womens culture (Among Women 14). Alison Sulloway acknowledges moments
of Austenian joy (84), but sees Austen first and foremost as a satirist. The
ideological fissures in Austens novels trouble, to quote the narrator in Northanger
Abbey, the hastening to perfect felicity (259) which marriage is supposed
to signal. In a provocative reading of Austens famous characterization of Pride
and Prejudice as too light & bright & sparkling (Letters 203), Joseph Litvak
12
See Mary Spongbergs article on Wollstonecraft, Macaulay, and Austen and their
treatment of English history.
16
suggests that Austen was critical of the marriage plot, whereby the traditional
novel idealizes heterosexuality and its reproduction (22). Austen may in fact be
seen as at once authorizing and enacting an ill-mannered reading of her own text
(22). I argue that Austens consistent alignment of women with animals is one of
the ways in which she authorize[s] and enact[s] counter-readings of the very
marriage plot that structures her novels; Austens ambivalence towards marriage
is expressed in the joint subordination of women and animals. Austen suggests
the subordination of women within marriage by consistently drawing connections
between the subordination of nature, animals, and women. We might relate this to
Austens references in her letters to maternity and childbirth as a type of breeding.
Austens correspondence registers an anxiety that womens participation
in marriage and motherhood reduces them to the status of animals, subject to
ownership and mistreatment by men. When we look at Austens letters to her sister
and nieces, births are announced in rather lukewarm tones: Mrs Clement is very
welcome to her little Boy & to my Congratulations into the bargain, if ever you
think of giving them (224). Childbirth, of course, came with grave dangers, as
recorded in a letter to Cassandra in 1798: I believe I never told you that Mrs
Coulthard and Anne, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in childbed.
We have not regaled Mary [pregnant at the time] with this news (20). But even
if tragedy was averted, childbirth carried certain costs. Austen advises her niece
Fanny Knight that by not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early
in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits, figure & countenance, while
Mrs Wm Hammond is growing old by confinements & nursing (332). A letter to
Cassandra of October 1, 1808, opens with congratulations on the birth of Edward
and Elizabeth Austen Knights sixth son:
We are extremely glad to hear of the birth of the Child, & trust everything will
proceed as well as it beginshis Mama has our best wishes, & he our second
best for health & comforttho I suppose unless he has our best too, we do
nothing for her. (139)
Austen recasts childbirth here as a loss of identity: there is no she without the
child, significantly a boy. In the same letter, Austen records her pity of Mrs. Tilson:
poor Woman! how can she be honestly breeding again? (140). Given that her
sister-in-laws sixth son makes a total of 11 children, this acerbic comment might
equally apply to her; indeed, in manuscript form the line is roughly cancelled
probably by Lord Brabourne (the grandson of Edward and Elizabeth Austen
Knight)but still legible as noted by Deirdre Le Faye (391, n6). Furthermore,
the same letter resentfully registers hospitality as another specifically female
labor: About an hour & half after your toils on Wednesday ended, ours began;
at seven oclock, Mrs Harrison, her two daughters & two Visitors, with Mr Debary
& his eldest sister walked in; & our Labour was not a great deal shorter than poor
Elizabeths, for it was past eleven before we were delivered (140). Female labor,
epitomized in childbirth, is a burden. In a letter to Fanny Knight of March 23,
1817, she writes of her niece Anna: Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she
17
is thirty.I am very sorry for her.Mrs Clement too is in that way again. I am
quite tired of so many Children.Mrs Benn has a 13th (336). Austen conducted
a lively literary correspondence with Anna, and celebrated her charms of flesh
and bone, mind, fancy, wit, and judgement in the poem In measured
verse.13 But Austen clearly fears that the aspiring novelist will sacrifice her
writing for domestic duties once she marries on November 8, 1814. A telling letter
composed in December 1815 spells out the exchange of book for child: As I wish
very much to see your Jemima, I am sure you will like to see my Emma, & have
therefore great pleasure in sending it for your perusal (310). Jemima was Annas
first baby, born October 20, 1815, rapidly followed by a second on September 27,
1816; all together Anna had seven children between 1815 and 1827.14
Austens embrace of Emma as her baby is in keeping with other letters. She
is never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can
forget her sucking child (182). Pride and Prejudice is my own darling Child
(201), and she speaks of her heroine with motherly adulation: I must confess
that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be
able to tolerate those who do not like her I do not know (201). While Austen
sees childbirth as detrimental to womens independence, the writing of books is
life-affirming, allowing her to participate in the public sphere as a professional
author. Sense and Sensibility was announced to be By a Lady, but this signature
was quickly supplanted. Pride and Prejudice was by By the Author of Sense
and Sensibility and all other lifetime publications were announced as being By
the Author of Pride and Prejudice, including the second edition of Sense and
Sensibility in 1813. Kathryn Sutherland makes the compelling point that Austens
title pages, rather than reflecting a desire for anonymity as is commonly argued,
map a knowable fictional space or estate (Textual Lives 232). That is, Austens
signature foregrounds her literary progeny.
At the end of Sense and Sensibility, the happy Elinor and Edward had
nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather
better pasturage for their cows (425). This casual yoking together of marriage
and milk production is strikingly suggestive. It parallels womens domestic role
to the subordination of nature for human ends, and registers the anxiety that
marriage and maternity animalize women. The novel hesitates to cast Mariannes
marriage to Brandon in romantic light, instead emphasizing Mariannes utility:
Edward, Elinor, and Mrs. Dashwood each felt [Colonel Brandons] sorrows, and
13
See Letters pp. 195, 266, 267, 274, 276, 282, 284, 289.
14
While Anna did not fulfil her literary aspirations, she did not completely give up
on them. See Jane Austen: A Family Record: Although Which is the Heroine? [the subject
of her correspondence with her aunt] had been destroyed unfinished, Anna had earned
herself a little money by publishing a novella, Mary Hamilton, in The Literary Souvenir for
1833, and followed this up by two small books for childrenThe Winters Tale (1841) and
Springtide (1842); at some time after the manuscript of Sanditon came into her possession
she attempted to continue the story, but gave up after writing about 20,000 words (William
Austen-Leigh, Richard Austen-Leigh, and Deirdre Le Faye 24445).
18
their own obligations, and Marianne, by general consent, was to be the reward
(429) for Colonel Brandon. The objectification of Marianne in the marriage plot
is reiterated when we see her cast into a passive role through marriage: she
found herself at nineteen, submitting to new attachments, entering on new duties,
placed in a new home, a wife, the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a
village (42930). John Alexanders 2008 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, a
vivid example of what Deborah Kaplan has termed the harlequinization of Jane
Austens novels (Mass Marketing 178), is intent on amplifying the Colonel
Brandon and Marianne plot as romance. The script even has Marianne spell it out
for us: What sadness he has known . He is the true romantic, I think. The
films glamorization of Colonel Brandon in part relies on his mastery of animals.
With Colonel Brandon on horseback in the background, Elinor compares his style
of courtship to the breaking in of horses: the great tamers of horses do it by being
gentle and then walking away. Nine times out of ten the wild horse will follow.
And sure enough, this Marianne does. The film also invents a scene of Colonel
Brandon as falconerwith a suitably impressed Marianne looking on: the falcon
has been tamed and trained, and so has Marianne. While the film casts this in a
romantic light, Austen is less sanguine about the animalization of women and their
subordination in marriage.
19
Chapter 2
The Potential of Death by Landscape
Habitat theory. The theory that aesthetic satisfaction experienced in the contemplation of
landscape stems from the spontaneous perception of landscape features which, in their
shapes, colours, spatial arrangements and other visible attributes, act as sign-stimuli
indicative of environmental conditions favourable for survival, whether they are really
favourable or not.
(Appleton 269)
In every perception of nature there is actually present the whole of society.

Theodor Adorno (Eisenman 141)
Margaret Atwoods short story, Death by Landscape (1991), depicts a

wilderness, at once threatening, perplexing, yet exhilarating for the women caught
up in it. As teenagers at summer camp, Lois and Lucy are on a canoe trip when
Lucy stepped sideways and disappeared from time (151). Lois spends the rest of
her life searching for a way to deal with this terrifying landscape, all the while
carrying her friends existence around with heralong with almost overwhelming
guilt concerning her part in Lucys disappearance.1 As an older adult, Lois feels
compelled to collect landscape paintings. Her male friends, who see landscape as
commodity, admire her as a shrewd art investor; however, her reason for
collecting the paintings is to search for her lost friend in the landscape. Looking
at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people
1 The choice of the name Lucy may reflect the idea of woman and landscape as united, as in
Wordsworths Lucy poems where Lucy dies and becomes a part of the landscape. Three Years She
Grew (1800) particularly comes to mind:
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own. (ll. 1-6)
Thus Nature spakethe work was done

How soon my Lucys race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be. (ll. 37-42)
In Naturalizing Gender: Womans Place in Wordsworths Ideological Landscape (English Literary
History vol. 53 1986), Marlon Ross writes of the Lucy poems, Lucys voice is nonexistent in the poem
and just at the point at which she may be allowed to speak, she is silenced with death (397).
20
in them or even animals, its as if there is something, or someone, looking back

out (129).
Atwoods narrative compresses many of the hopes and fears of earlier women
writers and the relationship their heroines have with their landscape into one short
story. Atwood portrays Lois as a woman who was living not one life but two: her
own and another shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be
realized (151). Lois, as other heroines in literature, spends much of her life trying
to fit into a landscape where neither refuge nor prospect seems to existwhere there
is no place to hide or to seek.
Loiss attempts to find a way to mediate her existence in a landscape that seems
antithetical to women, one that seems to want to absorb them and deny their
individuality, remain unsuccessful. Lois succeeds in recognizing that her life has
been an unconscious struggle with the landscape and that studying her landscape
paintings at least helps her to revise the story of Lucy, and, as she realizes at the very
end of the story, to keep Lucy entirely alive(153). We can trace this recognition of
the mediation between female subject and her landscape back to the eighteenth-
century novels by women. It is a difficult mediation indeed, fraught with violent
action and a search for a zone of safety and compromise from which the heroine
might gain some control or at least some understanding of her existence.2
The description of Loiss landscape paintings (all by men) in Atwoods story
closely resembles the themes from earlier British novels:
And these paintings are not landscape paintings. Because there arent any landscapes up
there, not in the old, tidy European sense, with a gentle hill, a curving river, a cottage, a
mountain in the background, a golden evening sky. Instead theres a tangle, a receding
maze, in which you can become lost almost as soon as you step off the path. There are no
backgrounds in any of these paintings, no vistas; only a great deal of foreground that goes
back and back, endlessly, involving you in its twists and turns of tree and branch and rock.
No matter how far back in you go, there will be more. And the trees themselves are hardly
trees; they are currents of energy, charged with violent colour. (152)
The Canadian landscape paintings do not represent the contained, neat eighteenth-
century European picturesque scenes, but the sensations that Lois experiences
resemble those of Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffes heroines from the late
eighteenth century. Although my intent is not to compare twentieth-century writers
with those of the eighteenth century at any length, I think it is significant to note that
Atwood and Austen have some common threads in their fictional work. They both
have female protagonists attempting to reconcile themselves to male-dominated
landscapes and to find a way to come to terms with that landscape, not allowing it
to dominate them. The endings of Death by Landscape and Jane Austens novels
illustrate women who have found a new sense of self that co-exists with the
2 Chapter 4 of Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams provides a helpful discussion of the
old idea of reflection, which is challenged by the term mediation, a more active process, an act of
intercession. In one sense Williams describes mediation as reconciliation, or interpretation between
adversaries or strangers (97), although in a neutral sense it may be considered interaction by separate
forces. Still mediation remains a term to describe the process of relationship between society and
art (98).
21
landscape. These heroines refuse to become just an attractive part of the scene; they
use the landscape to their advantage.
Something in the controlled eighteenth-century male-spectators view of the
landscape persistently unravels for women and does not suit them. Their
perception of the landscape deviates from Popes point of view in Windsor Forest,
where men clearly control the scene. Women can tell the story of the landscape but
have no illusions about who controls it. As soon as these women step off the path,
they lose their safe place and their prospect. Lois handles this sense of disorientation
in the landscape by a realization of its currents of energy, charged with violent
colour and by containing that energy in the frame of a picture/story. If she cannot
force any real and final closure on such a bounded work, at least she can keep the
Lucy side of herself from becoming totally forgotten and absorbed within an
otherwise meaningless and chaotic landscape. She looks at the paintings, she looks
into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy (152).
Whether during the eighteenth century or the twenty-first, the relationship
between the authors gender and the way the heroine interacts with her landscape
reveals something of the gender perceptions and stereotypes of the time and the
ways in which women writers have circumvented these. (Many of these stereotypes
have persisted through the ages.) Of the many ways a reader can locate the heroine
in the landscape, one approach reveals the landscape as a layering of past and
present for the viewera palimpsest. The palimpsest of the previous landscape in
any narrative consists of many physical, cultural, and sociological strata,
imperfectly revealed under the most recent landscape. So landscape, as has been
discussed earlier, consists of many things, all in combination to be read by the
protagonist, and if read astutely, the female protagonist can negotiate her way to the
safest parts of it, avoiding danger and finding refuge.
As we consider this mediation of heroine and landscape, we may focus upon
ways in which men and women perceive their landscapes differently because of
cultural orientations and aesthetic geography, indicating that landscapes beauty and
interest reflect how individuals perceive a habitat as a good place to survive. While
our major thrust remains the position of female characters, particularly the heroines,
in Jane Austens landscape, we might understand her interest in landscape viewing
better in light of her predecessors, Fanny Burney and Anne Radcliffe, novelists
familiar to both Austen and Atwood.
What about Loiss (and Lucys) forebears, Burneys Evelina and Radcliffes
Emily? Margaret Atwood may well have felt the influence of these women writers and
the interaction of their heroines with the landscape, as well as their heroines abilities
to frame their own landscapes, providing a way for them to hide and seekto survive
with dignity. Two late eighteenth-century novels written by women, Evelina (1778) by
Fanny Burney and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, show heroines
(like Lois) who are neither satisfied to be in or out of the landscape.
As we look at these two novels, we recognize how women novelists situate their
heroines in the landscape. We will examine the ways in which the landscape remains
a danger to the heroines, who fear losing themselves to masculine dominance, a
prominent theme in these late eighteenth-century novels and one which persists
throughout the nineteenth century. The readings of these novels work as guides for
observing the heroines in the landscape of Jane Austen.
22
The theme of the heroine trapped between two positions, the one a static, passive
fusion with landscape and the other a nascent attempt to control it herself, is
revealed in Burneys and Radcliffes works. Being trapped in a no-womans land
remains a problem for heroines in many of the works we will look at from Austens
early juvenile piece, Jack and Alice, to her last effort, Sanditon. However, Burney
and Radcliffe treat the problem quite differently than does Austen.
To understand the positioning of any viewer of the landscape, we must remember
eighteenth-century historical/aesthetic changes in awareness of landscape
perception. Burneys use of conventional landscape perception, as described by art
historians and critics, begins to reveal the vulnerability of women in the landscape.
As we continue to focus upon the position of the heroine, we must also remember
Jay Appletons concept of safety involving a zone of compromisea good place
for the heroine to hide and to seek. The scenes from Evelina reveal a heroine caught
in a male-controlled landscape where no zone of compromise exists. Because
Evelina has no refuge (where a woman can be one with landscape) or prospect
(where a woman can control landscape), she is subject to the full force of male
violence present in that landscape. Later women writers, such as Jane Austen, find
ways for their heroines to mediate a place in the landscape, but in Evelina, Burney
only projects the frightened helplessness of her heroine.
Besides the physical place of the heroine, landscape as a layering of past
landscapesnarratological palimpsestsbecomes an important factor in viewing
the scene, both for the heroine and for the reader. The past experienceboth
physical and intellectualof the heroine contributes to her regard of the landscape.
Narratologist Gerard Genette has emphasized the importance of the landscape
viewers background in perceiving a present landscape. What layers of past
landscapesbaggageare brought along by both the heroine and the author? These
layers exist due to both the gender experiences of the heroine and those of the
novelist writing about her. Even the spatial metaphor of separate spheres for men
and women in the nineteenth century suggests that each gender draws upon different
materials out of which to construct a landscape.
Twentieth-century (and early twenty-first century) psychologists, geographers,
and feminist literary critics suggest that women bring these culturally influenced
gender experiences to their interactions with landscape even today. In The Mysteries
of Udolpho, Radcliffe brings into her heroines palimpsest of the landscape, the
whole tradition of the eighteenth-century male landscape spectator, along with
nascent questioning of the pride in control of landscape exemplified by male
aestheticians. The previous eighteenth-century glorification of a landscape that
represents Gothic liberty and Roman authority Radcliffe turns into an unframed
(therefore uncontrollable) terrifying landscape with neither freedom nor safety for
the heroine. Burney and Radcliffe recognize that women have a very tenuous
existence in a landscape with which they both want to harmonize and yet control.
Their heroines are aware of their vulnerable positions in the landscape, but it
remains for later women novelists to find ways for their heroines to mediate a more
comfortable place there.
Politically, Burney and Radcliffe have few similarities, yet their landscapes use
the same old male conventions of landscape descriptionwith a twist. The
landscapes sometimes go out of control, moving into what might seem to be a
23
shockingly unfeminine area of violenceone which later heroines (such as Lois)

increasingly recognize, although they still cannot seem to avoid it. The heroines in
these novels are not satisfied to be an unquestioning part of the landscape, yet they
never feel satisfactorily in control of it. Far from appropriating the landscape as a
commodity or managing the malleable mass of nature to the desired shape
attempted by earlier male landscape viewers, these women writers, and their
heroines, face the difficulties of controlling the landscape, all the while recognizing
that their male critics harbor very clear ideas of the limitations of authoresses
either of books or of their own fate.
I dont know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty; she is only in other
folks way, declares the obnoxious middle-class suitor of Evelina. Margaret Anne
Doody describes Evelina as a novel where Evelinas trials growing up reflect the
errors in her society rather than herself (Frances Burney 46). As her later novels,
Evelina, Burneys first novel, exhibits aggression against women (who are many
times missing last names) and the anxiety which these women experience. Most
men, regardless of class, appear as threats; in fact, Doody calls Evelina
antimasculinist satire (65). Like Burneys later novel Camilla, Evelina explains
conduct manual behavior for women, but, as Doody comments concerning the
later novel, under the surface, it is a critique of male behavior and what men try to
force women to learn. Landscape, then, is not the only area where Burney seems to
express mixed feelings, using the conventional landscape aesthetic as well as
deviating from it. As another critic notes, Burney represents a paradox of the
timesa schizophrenic ability to see the gross exaggeration of feeling in
sentimental rhetoric and yet to deal in it (Murray 45). Evelina recognizes the overly
sentimental address of a would-be lover and rejects it. Yet the novel remains full of
examples of sentimental rhetoric that Burney must perceive as the appropriate
kind.
Conventionally sentimental or not, the landscape intrigues the reader. The
landscape of Evelina consists of paths (literal and figurative)paths from which
women deviate only at their physical peril (as do Atwoods Lucy and Lois). Yet,
Fanny Burney is not the only female writer of her time to use women and paths
together. Noted evangelist and writer, Hannah More, uses the same path image to
show how a woman racing with a man in the career of genius is more likely than
the man to become distracted by beauty at the side of the road, losing the race
(Strictures 27). In Mores imaginary race, upon losing, the woman must marry the
winner. The insecurity of the early women novelists in their landscape contrasts
rather sharply with their masculine contemporaries. In many of the landscape
paintings and poems of the eighteenth century, the point of view is generally that of
a controlling prospect-viewer who does not confine himself to a narrow path but
enjoys a broad overview of the scene.
Burney begins her novel using the conventional controlling devices of the scenes
used by the male artists before her. She was always fascinated with theater (and
wrote several plays, a few of which enjoyed some popularity at the time), and a
stage-like effect exists in many of her novels. The broadly played character of Mme.
Duval resembles the transvestite larger than life stage dame. Doody calls Evelina
sustained emphatic and expressionistic farce (Frances Burney 48). The early
scenes of the novel, set in ballrooms (and even the theater itself) as well as the later
24
scenes in the pump room, suggest the control of a proscenium framing the setting
of the novel.3
But the instability and vulnerability that Evelina experiences in the natural
settings suggest concerns of the author about position in the landscape. We regard
all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behavior, and
individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time, writes
D. W. Meinig. Adding to Meinigs interpretation of landscape, I suggest that gender
also helps to construct the landscape (if we agree that gender is a social and cultural
construct). The landscape of home is examined by David Sopher who states that
home has no meaning apart from the journey which takes one outside home
(Meinig 133) and home has to do with people and memories. Not only in Burneys
and Radcliffes novels is the theme of home crucial, but also in Mansfield Park,
Emma, and Persuasion, the heroines find themselves trapped in boundary areas
between old familiar homes and new unknown ones. The same concern for the
location of home exists in the male-authored novels, such as The Heart of
Midlothian by Jane Austens contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, but male authors have
a different relationship to their heroines than do the female authors; it is more
historical and nationalistic in nature. What eventually becomes home for these
women in female-authored novels involves not only emotional connections but
viable means of physical support as well.
Not all of Burneys landscapes have stage-like features, and her heroine becomes
deeply confused in landscapes away from home. Some landscapes place Evelina on
paths that are dark, threatening, and obscure. A zone of compromisea narrow
area with access to refuge and prospect for the heroinebecomes dangerously
constricted and, at times, nonexistent. Part of the danger to women in these scenes
emanates from a kind of out-of-control aggressionsavage jokes on the part of
supposedly civil men such as Captain Mirvan and his companions as they roam
around the landscape threatening women.
Doody mentions the practical jokers who go beyond the civil limits, one
outstanding example of this excess being the scene that includes the old womens
footrace (another race that no woman can really win). Certainly no zone of
compromise exists for the two infirm women who are forced to compete in a race
where the bored lords place bets on who will win. When Evelina tries to rescue one
of the women who has fallen with a great deal of force on the gravel path, one of
the lords cries, No foul play! (294). At last one woman falls and was too much
hurt to move, and declared her utter inability to make another attempt. Mr. Coverley
was quite brutal: he swore at her with unmanly rage, and seemed scarce able to
refrain even from striking her (294). Evelinas description of the dangerous path of
two women makes the horror of exposed landscape painfully clear.
But two landscapes in particular involve what the heroine perceives as a direct
threat to herself. The first scene involves the violent mock robbery of the coach
containing Mme. Duval and Evelina by Captain Mirvan and Sir Clement. The
second landscape is Vauxhall where Evelina seems threatened by a gang rape on the
3 Jane Austens earliest works have theatrical influences as well. Of course, her family encouraged
amateur theatricals, and Jane Austen wrote plays. Her youthful settings sometimes have a proscenium
look.
25
dark and narrow paths of that pleasure garden. Certainly human actors cause
problems for Evelina, but the landscape provides neither prospect to foresee danger
nor refuge to escape it.
As with the old womens race, the plan for the mock robbery was described by
the two men as rare sport with the old French woman. The dehumanization of
Mme. Duval seems to be their goal. Captain Mirvan calls the plan to convoy a
crazy vessel to the shore of Mortification (124), as he depersonalizes her entirely.
Even though most of the other women at Howard Grove know of the plot, they keep
the secret. These women are threatened themselves and would not hazard the
consequence of discovering his [Mirvans] designs (127). Evelina and her
grandmother (Mme. Duval) do not have any idea where they are in the landscape.
Nothing is known except that the male entourage attending their chariot knows of
the plot and cooperates with the two gentlemen, who pretend to be robbers. The only
thing the women know for certain is that they are being driven around the
countryside for three hours and are totally lost.
Sir Clement comes up to the coach to declare his affection for Evelina and
reassure her that the robbery is not real, while Captain Mirvan drags her
grandmother off to a ditch, shakes her violently and ties her hand and foot. The
reader is left with the image of a poor terrified woman covered with dirt, weeds,
and filth, and her face was really horrible; for the pomatum and powder from her
head, and the dust from the road, were quite pasted on her skin by her tears, which,
with her rouge, made so frightful a mixture, that she hardly looked human (134).
Mme. Duval describes herself as being pulled and hauled as if she had no more
feeling than a horse (135). The dehumanizing treatment of a woman as an
annoying object in the landscape may have moved the eighteenth-century reader, as
it did Evelina, from laughter at first to irritation with the Captain, for carrying his
love of tormentingsport he calls it,to such barbarous and unjustifiable
extremes (136).
We should note that, during this scene, Evelina and her grandmother are totally
unable to recognize any place in the landscape either to hide or to seek. No zone of
compromise existsjust unbounded male violence. The Captains raptures, during
supper, at the success of his plan, were boundless (137), and his success only
encourages him to increase his torment of Mme. Duval, while his own wife fears
trying to dissuade him.
The second landscape that seems to veer out of control into hostility toward
women (in this case, Evelina herself) is Vauxhall, which Evelina terms very pretty,
but too formal; I should have been better pleased, had it consisted less of straight
walks (178). Although even many male authors of the day found formal gardens
old-fashioned, this aspect of Vauxhall does not bode well for Evelinathis
landscape implying a certain sense of masculine control as she quotes another poet:
Grove nods at grove, each alley has its brother (178). Or at least in this landscape,
the masculine groves and alleys collude with each other.
Vauxhall, a kind of eighteenth-century equivalent of Coney Island, is full of
deceptions. First, Evelina hears a bell ring and is hurried away to view an artificial
cascade by her companions, a group of upstart middle-class friends of Mme. Duval
who have no real sense of culture at all and acutely embarrass Evelina. She explains
the surprise cascade: But this was not the only surprise which was to divert them
26
at my expense; for they led me about the garden purposely to enjoy my first sight of
various other deceptions (179). As the two young women of the party taunt
Evelina, she follows them down a long, dark alley where they find themselves
surrounded by a large party of gentlemen, apparently very riotous, and who were
hallooing, leaning on one another, and laughing immoderately (180). The men
come out from behind some trees and form a circle around the young women, and
Evelina observes that for some minutes we were kept prisoners, till at last one of
them, rudely seizing hold of me, said I was a pretty little creature (181). The men
(as in the old womens race and the mock robbery) consider Evelinas attempt to
escape down one after the other of the dark alleys as a sport. At each avenue she is
confronted with a new pursuer who would hold her in the most familiar manner
and taunt her by asking to accompany her in a race (181), as all the others
laughed. She is finally rescued by Sir Clement, who is apparently there to join in the
fun of abducting some loose young girl who might stray down the path. He has
trouble convincing the group that Evelina is not really an actress, or possibly a
prostitute; however, he spirits her down an even more desolate alley after he rescues
her.
Again, there is no place for a woman to hide or seek in this dark, male-controlled
landscape. A landscape that begins as a seemingly innocent, orderly, well-
manicured garden turns into a scene with gangs of gentlemen hiding behind the
trees and waiting to attack (and probably rape) some unsuspecting woman. An
ironic aftermath of this terrible ordeal for Evelina is that the brother of Bid and Poll
is more concerned about Evelinas absence because of her naivet than he is about
his sisters, who were still gone. He says: As long as Miss is come back, I dont
mind; for as to Bid and Poll, they can take care of themselves (185).
If, in these two scenes, Evelina does not remain in danger of experiencing death
by landscape, her situation contains a threat similar to that of Atwoods wilderness.
The artificial wilderness of Vauxhall reveals a scene of neither refuge nor prospect
and exposes Evelina to rapea violent denial of her rights as an individual. What
is a safe place for a woman, and how can it be recognized aesthetically in
literature? How are women able to mediate an aesthetic space for themselves, a zone
of compromise of their own? These are important questions we can pose for Burney
and Radcliffes novels, giving us a good idea of the prominent novels and novelistic
landscapes by women with which Jane Austen was familiar, but these questions
cannot be answered well until we come to Austens novels. A look at the landscape
of Evelina and The Mysteries of Udolpho allows us to contrast other late eighteenth-
century landscapes with Austens use of aesthetic space, which we will see later.
Appleton perceives landscape in some ways that help readers to understand the
connections between heroines and place. Although he does not treat womens
position in the landscape directly, what he does say about human placement can
influence our ideas of feminine aesthetic space.
Before we examine gendered perceptions of landscape in Radcliffes The
Mysteries of Udolpho, we need to consider the relationship between society and art.
Aesthetic geography provides useful tools for understanding the mediation between
these two. What do we like about landscape, and why do we like it? asks
Appleton. He believes geography needs the arts and that symbolism is the bridge
between the requirements for biological survival and sensations derived from the
27
contemplation of landscape. In The Experience of Landscape, Appleton proposes a

landscape theory which attempts to explain how symbolism bridges the gap between
survival in and aesthetic appreciation of the landscape. Appletons theory analyzes
landscape on the basis of habitat (pleasurable sensations in the experience of
landscape to environmental conditions favourable to biological survival [vii]) and
prospect/refuge (landscape perceived in terms of strategic appraisal of the landscape
as a potential habitat).
In addition, Appleton concludes that landscape which affords both a good
opportunity to see and a good opportunity to hide is aesthetically more satisfying
than one which affords neither (74). However, he emphasizes that experiencing the
landscape aesthetically does not depend directly upon environmental conditions
favorable to satisfying primitive needs. The important thing is that the person thinks
the landscape is favorable.
In his framework of symbolism, Appleton names kinds of prospects, refuges, and
hazards in the landscape and how they are interrelated. Restrictions on prospect,
even mere peepholes, the framing of the scene for the heroine, become significant.
In other words, how limited the heroines prospect becomes affects her potential
range of action, whether the restriction be a framed landscape painting or a path.
Hazards in the landscape present equally important experiences, whether they are
incidents or impediments, animate or inanimate, natural or artificial. As Appleton
comments, To abolish hazard altogether is to deprive the prospect and the refuge
of their meaningful roles (96).
A particularly interesting and important kind of balance in the landscape
Appleton calls the edge-of-the-wood phenomenon, described as:
[a woodland] usually depicted with an unenclosed, penetrable edge and often a path, or
paths, leading invitingly into the trees. The effect is enhanced by accentuating the details
of the symbolism in either half; the prospect is distinguished by clarity, distance and
sometimes falling ground, the refuge by an impression of the darkness, depth and
capaciousness of the woodland in which the observer can at his own choosing, be
swallowed up. (135)
Writers, as well as land managers and painters, strive to tone down the stark
contrasts between prospect and refuge that exist in edge-of-the-woods images.
Appleton describes the basic solution as the creation of a zone of compromise,
where the prospect dominant voids spill over into the refuge-dominant masses
(215), so that the participant can achieve the advantages of good visibility and
effective concealment at the same time (216). A good example of this special zone
of compromise, edge-of-the-woods image is Gainsboroughs Cottage Door. The
young family have their backs to the open door of the cottage, which is guarded by
some tall and sturdy ancient oaks. Through the heavy trees beyond, the viewer can
see an open prospect, falling away from their location at the edge of the woods,
privileging the cottagers with both a home camouflaged by the forest, yet open to a
view of what might approach them.
For Appleton, human experience of the landscape is inbred, evolutionary, and yet
socially and culturally learned (and therefore affected by gender). We look back to
a nostalgic primeval experience and think of landscape as somehow fulfilling our
28
Figure 2.1 Thomas Gainsborough, Cottage Door. Courtesy of Huntington

Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
29
biological needs. However, our involvement with symbolic landscape helps us

reconcile the symbolism of our emancipation from the tyranny of environment
with the symbolism of that same environment (173). We find ourselves having a
vicarious relationship with an artificial landscape, produced by landscape architects
or by novelists.
The advantage of the author over the artist and photographer, however, is that
ability to manipulate words to reduplicate landscape symbols, drawing on vaguely
defined but nevertheless powerful associations (Appleton 213), a reduplication,
which calls to mind the narratological palimpsesta layering of past landscapes.
Adding to the complicated layering of images that the author describes is the need
for the reader to translate the authors word picture of landscape back into the
readers own spatial experience. So as readers, we do not have the direct experience
of a painting or a photograph, but our experience is mediated through words.
Additional associations involved in translating add to the palimpsest even more
gender-based and psychologically-based perceptions because it is not just how we
see a landscape, but also how we relate to the language of landscape itself.
Although it is impossible to demonstrate with any certainty a correspondence
between author, character, and readers perceptions, a correspondence (or lack of it)
can be shown between the authors perception of the landscape and that of the
heroine, and part of this correspondence relates to the gender of the author.
The terms used in this study to mediatesettle the differencesbetween
women and their literary landscapes reflect Appletons geographic aesthetics. Lois
finds a way, albeit a limited one, in which to deal with landscape, by imagining Lucy
still alive in the paintings. Lois creates a zone of compromise. And this zone of
compromise is just thata settlement with both sides conceding. Lois has gained
more control over landscape, but she has not saved Lucy, and, as a result, Lois can
never be totally at ease. Evelina finds herself, when she deviates at all from the paths
of culturally prescribed patriarchal control, in a place of extreme hazard, with no
refuge or prospect. Prospect, refuge, hazard, zone of compromise, and edge-of-the-
wood environments remain terms useful in locating heroines, giving them
boundaries or making them aware of the lack of boundaries, as they attempt to find
their way in a landscape dominated by a masculine culture. As we examine the
landscape of France, Spain, and Italy in Radcliffes novel, Appleton provides helpful
ways of seeing Austens fictive landscapes.
Published sixteen years after Evelina, Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho
moves from conventional two-dimensional picturesque scenes to something out-of-
control and frightening in a landscape that also seems haunted with men. Heroes
and villains frequently emerge from Radcliffes landscape, and the heroine, Emily
St. Aubert (she, at least, has a last name), acts occasionally as part of the landscape
(insider), as well as controlling viewer of a framed landscape (outsider).
La Valle, Emilys home in sixteenth-century France, resembles more closely an
eighteenth-century scene from the English Lake Districtwith a rather startling
view of the Pyrenees. The landscape description is quite conventionally framed as a
picturesque and pastoral two-dimensional work of art, reminiscent of Poussin. But
even in this idyllic scene which causes Emily to contemplate God, some unsettling
events occur. In the little fishing house, the familys pastoral retreat, Emily hears her
own lute being played but cannot discover the player. Also Emily finds that her
30
mothers bracelet containing Emilys miniature has been stolen. Finally a

mysterious stranger writes a sonnet on the wainscot calling her the goddess of the
fairy scene, nymph of these shades (7). Some male presence in the landscape is
inviting Emily to enter into it as an insider too. Although the notion of a mysterious
suitor romantically stimulates Emily, the violation of her property unnerves her. In
some ways, this strangers actions are like Evelinas suitors, meant to be a jest but
hinting of potential violation of the heroines person.
Following the death of her mother, Emily and her father begin a journey through
the Pyrenees to Toulouse. Although her father dies early on, her journey continues
for the entire novel until she finally returns to La Valle. The Pyrenees, the Bay of
Biscay, the Alps, northern Italy, and the Apennines all provide Radcliffes heroine
with numerous opportunities to use her Claude glass-like descriptive powers. With
this framing device, except for the foreground, details are largely lost as the
landscape becomes controlled. However in several instances, Emily seems to be a
woman involved with a masculine presence in landscape rather than a woman as an
intrinsic part of the landscape, one with Nature (as was Lucy of Wordsworths
landscape).
One of Emilys typical views from the lofty cliffs of the Pyrenees encompasses
a view that moves from mountains to plains to sea in an unbelievable panorama.
Emily could not restrain her transport as she looked over the pine forests of the mountains
upon the vast plains that enriched with woods, towns, blushing vines, and plantations of
almonds, palms and olives, stretched along, till their various colours melted in distance
into one harmonious hue, that seemed to unite earth with heaven. Through the whole of
this glorious scene the majestic Garonne wandered; descending from its source among the
Pyrenees, and winding its blue waves towards the Bay of Biscay. (28)
This is typical of one of her landscapes that seem to take in most of the geography
of an area (and follows Gilpins requisite Claude glass scene-making). As a view is
sublimeawe-inspiring to the point of creating a frisson of potential danger,
Radcliffe tells the reader that this was such a scene as Salvator would have chosen,
had he then existed, for his canvas (30).
Early in the eighteenth century, male tourists and writers (such as Addison)
became interested in landscape as they made the Grand Tour part of their
experience. However, interest in the Alps and other Continental landscape was
gradually displaced by a heightened awareness of English landscape with the
country estate serving as a miniature version of the English realm itself. The
ideology of the English Park as a special landscape representing English patriotism
actually started in the seventeenth century, but the combination of aestheticism and
utility, promoted by eighteenth-century landscape artists and architects, combined
to valorize the English political system, the private property holder, and a strongly
patriarchal culture. In general, the prospect poets view of the landscape was one
which women found difficult to share since they rarely owned property themselves.
In fact, they were more likely to be part of the graceful nature reflected in the
landscape itself, retaining that insider view. With the interest in English rural
landscape, improvers, travelers, and writers took on the role of aestheticians as
well. These aestheticians insisted on viewing landscape as scenes from the favored
31
Italian landscape painters of the seventeenth century: Claude Lorrain, Gaspard

Poussin (Dughet), and Salvator Rosa. Denis Cosgrove describes the typical
Claudian landscape as one framed by coulisses and leading the eye via a series of
highlights to a vanishing point at the horizon (201). Eighteenth-century landscape
architects, artists, and writers all tried endlessly to capture the Arcadian effects of
Claude and the mythic images of Poussin in landscapes which frequently
duplicated their use of views of Tivoli and the temple of the Sibyl. Rosa
exemplified the sublime ideal in rugged landscape. When James Thomson wrote in
1748 in his Castle of Indolence, Whateer Lorrain light-touched with softening
hue, Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew, he was revealing a
quintessential eighteenth-century prescription for seeing the English landscape.
Landscapes by Rosa, in particular, seemed to have heavily influenced Ann
Radcliffes portrayal of the landscape in her novels, since she had not visited the
actual landscapes themselves.
The three most influential landscape architects of the eighteenth century, William
Kent, Lancelot Capability Brown, and Humphry Repton, were clearly influenced
by Claude and Poussin. Kent designed the famous grounds of Rousham to resemble
a Claudian landscape. Cosgrove describes the view there as based upon a series of
recurrent landscape images: Beginning at the house, the primary view is
determined by a wide bowling green stretching away and terminating where the land
slopes steeply to the river (201). The temple of the Sibyl at Stowe is also Kents
design. The mock monastic ruin that he installed on the grounds of one estate seems
very much like a painting. This intriguing combination of classical and gothic
elements Cosgrove attributes to the general English cultural belief at the time that
the English had achieved a union of the antithetical principle of Roman authority
and Gothic liberty, (203) a principle we will later see in Walter Scotts novelistic
landscape.
However, Radcliffes views on Italian and Gothic landscape seem to refute the
pride and control of landscape exemplified by these male aestheticians. The
landscape of Italy described in The Mysteries of Udolpho reflects a morally
decadent masculine culture with a sense of freedom that is at once capricious and
lawless. The sense of a thoughtful, Roman, law-based society fused with a
medieval western European Christianity does not exist here. Such a society is
replaced by an atmosphere particularly hostile to any weak but ethical person with
a sense of aesthetic integrity, for instance, a woman such as Radcliffes heroine,
Emily.
Lancelot Capability Brown carried on Kents work, which, in many ways, was
a reaction to what the English saw as the absolutism of the French system as
characterized in the landscape architecture of Versailles. Both Kent and Brown
began to incorporate more curves in the landscape. They established painterly views
where the ha-has separated the vast lawns from the pasture lands yet allowed the
proud English property owner to remind himself of his good husbandry of the land
with views of the cattle grazing at an appropriate distance.
As Brown continued this process of mixing the classical with a sense of Gothic
freedom, it is important to remember that property rights were open to a very small
number of men (and certainly not women). Paternalism marks the English taste for
landscape during this period. Brown goes to great length to compare his gardening
32
techniques to literary devices, using landscape as narrative.4 Brown, more so than

his predecessor, composed a unified narrative of his landscape; Christopher Thacker
calls it a single, multi-dimensional composition, in which the contours of the land
and the lakes, and the relationship of trees and grassy lawn vary continuously as one
walks onwards, experiencing not many different and separated pictorial
compositions, but innumerable variations on a single theme (210). And of course,
we might note that this description is not unlike some versions of the newly
developing novel form.5
Browns successor, Humphry Repton, might be said to have taken Browns spare
prospects and distances and prettified them. Toward the end of the century, the
theory of the picturesque became more prominent in landscape design, and Repton
interpreted this theory as one generally favoring asymmetrical landscapes with less
order and congruity than those of Brown. (As did Brown, Repton wrote a great deal
about his theory of art and its application to the landscape.) Most interesting (and
satirized by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park) were his large books of before and
after landscapes. His improved views remove any unsightly huts, beggars in the
flower garden, or vulgar butcher shops. Repton writes that a painter sees things as
they are; the landscape gardener as they will be (Hipple 233). Later, we will
examine Repton and Austens similarities in treatment of landscape. Austen could
both poke fun at Repton yet admire some of his landscapes as well.
Repton admired Edmund Burkes Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and Burkes perceptions of the sublime
and beautiful greatly influenced improvers (as well as aestheticians), many of whom
used his theories as a basis for a landscape which provided a compromise between
the sublime and beautiful.6 Edmund Burke, in many ways, acts as a bridge between
earlier eighteenth-century aesthetic views and those of the later half of the century
and beyond. His philosophy of politics (as well as morality and economy) might be
described as organic. If change is to occur in any area, it is only fitting that this
change be slow and evolving as a natural outgrowth of what he saw as Gods law.
And, of course, this was best exemplified in natural English liberty. The
aristocracy, the gentry, and the lower classes all should know their duties and
responsibilities, and any changes therein must necessarily be very gradual. Women
and peasants needed to be valued and taken care of, as did the landscape.
When Burke began to explore aesthetic taste, he saw the Sublime as directly
related to the human urge for self-preservation. Experienced at a safe distance, the
Sublime, according to Burke, can be quite exhilaratinggiving the spectator a
frisson of terror, as in a Rosa landscape. Burke shows how a primary fear for ones
physical safety can be transposed to the vicarious excitement of a narrow escape
from dangerthat edge of-the-wood feeling Appleton discusses. As long as pain
4 See English Landscaping and Literature, 1660-1840 (NY: Oxford UP, 1966) by Edward Malins
for more on landscape as narrative.
5 In fact, Appleton comments on the process of the writer and reader dealing with landscape in this
way: The great advantage of the writer is that, since his landscape pictures have to be coded into words
and then decoded by the reader into pictures, there are two opportunities for the enrichment of the
landscape by the imagination (214).
6 See Walter J. Hipple, Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-century
British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale, Ill: Southern Ill UP, 1957.
33
and danger do not press too closely, we feel curiosity and sympathy. Radcliffes
heroine, Emily, experiences the equivalent of Burkes sublime in the rugged
mountain prospect views that she describes in the Pyrennes and the mountains of
Italy. These views are sublime as long as she feels a God-inspired fear and awe in
the vastness of the scene without immediate danger.
On the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, Burke deals with what he
perceives as the Beautiful.7 As the Sublime is related to self-preservation, the
Beautiful is related to society. Beauty is a social quality related to physical passion,
tender sentiments, sympathy, and a growing reliance of feeling as a means of
insight. Burkes idea of the beautiful is exemplified in The Mysteries of Udolpho
by the little fishing house and its diminutive serene surrounding at La Valle or the
small hortus conclusussecret gardenwhere Emily meets her lover. Although
Burkes theory was not intended solely as a means of describing landscape, it
remained heavily influential in that area throughout the rest of the century.
Burkes Sublime and Beautiful, while compelling for artists and improvers, left a
large space between the two qualities of landscape, which the Reverend William
Gilpin strove to fill. The Picturesquethat beauty which is agreeable in a picture
(Watkins 75)filled the space. During what has been called the picturesque decade
of the 1790s, the highest praise for a landscape was to say it resembled a painting.
During his travels through England, Gilpin developed a theory for seeing nature as art.
If the property owners seemed to control landscape economically and aesthetically
earlier in the century, the advent of tourism and the search for the picturesque made
commodification of the landscape even more apparent.8 Scene-hopping became
very popular with tourists, who took Gilpins books along for their illustrative
landscape pictures to make sure they viewed the scene from the correct angle and
mentally edited out of the picture any feature they were not supposed to see.
A real concern for framing and perspective becomes noticeable when one
realizes the number of traveling knick-knacks required of the fashionable late
eighteenth-century landscape viewer. Besides the sketchbooks and journals, the up-
to-date tourist on tour would probably carry a Claude glass. However, Gilpin and the
picturesque tourists were, by means of the Claude glass, able to appropriate natural
scenery and process it into a commodity ... convert[ing] natures unmanageable
bounty into a frameable possession, according to Andrews (81). Anything outside
the frame had a questionable existence. The predominantly masculine, patriarchal,
controlling position of the landscape basically excluded women as spectators
(unless of course they wished to take up their Claude glasses, as many women did,
and tour the landscape using the proper masculine perspective). Even when, as some
proto-romantics did toward the end of the century, these male prospect-viewers got
down into the landscape, they were not of it; they simply went from reasoning
control of it to an imaginative control of the landscape.
However, some critics have concluded that the picturesque became a liberating
landscape for women in that it is detached from the patriarchal historical scenes of
7 Later critics have occasionally commented that Burkes list of adjectives describing what is
beautiful seem to indicate that he is thinking of his wife, i.e. small, smooth, delicate.
8 See Malcolm Andrews The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics, and Tourism in Britain,
1760-1800 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989) for a more complete study of picturesque scenery as commodity.
34
previous landscapes. W. C. Snyder believes that critically and historically, then, the
picturesque opens women artists to participation in a specific artistic program
embracing values with which they could identify and feel free to express (160). He
adds that the picturesque contains a strain in the movement which leans toward
care and preservation (the feministic), without an imagery of procreation and
fertility (the materialistic) (161). Jill Heydt-Stevenson, who has studied extensively
the connections between Austen and the picturesque, writes:
In Austens novels, arguments about the construction of a national identity converge with
arguments about the construction of womanhood and the construction of landscape. When we
examine this convergence, we find that Austen explores the junction between the boundaries
of personal liberty allowed to women and those allowed to the landscape itself, privileging for
her own heroines bonds with the wilder, unornamented, picturesque landscape. (261)
So, even though women writers were aware of the proprietor gaze on the landscape,
Radcliffe, and later Austen, found ways of using the picturesque views of the
landscape to their advantage. Radcliffe paints landscapes, which contain both
masculine and feminine images.
It certainly will not surprise the reader who realizes the strong presence of the
male spectator that, after Emily is separated from her true love, Valancourt, she
associates most of the landscape she sees on her journey with him, and a mysterious
male presence (as at the fish house at La Valle) again suffuses the landscape. In
Toulouse, where she is forbidden to see him by her aunt, he says, I have haunted
this placethese gardens, for manymany nights, with a faint, very faint hope of
seeing you (152). Later, the sublimity of the Alps sometimes banished the idea of
Valancourt, though they more frequently revived it (163). The landscape seems to
affect her psychically. As she is confined in Udolpho, or some other castle prison,
she frequently hears music off in the distance at night and associates it with
Valancourt. In any case, she seems to attach this male presence to her own in order
to retain the eighteenth-century male spectator view.
However, Emilys views cease to be either sublime or picturesque under two
different circumstances. One involves a recurrent reverie she has during which she
imagines herself as a sea-nymph. The other occurs when Emily is forced to go with
henchmen from Udolpho into an unframed, terrifying situation that is all hazard and
no refuge. As a result of her dream of a seascape, Emily composes a poem called
The Sea-Nymph where the ultimate refuge for a maid like her is under the sea.
In coral bowrs I love to lie,
And hear the surges roll above,
And through the waters view on high
The proud ships sail, and gay clouds move. (179)
As a sea-nymph, woman has the ultimate place to hide and place to seek.9 She can
dance upon the lapsing tides or seek [her] crystalcourt,/ deep in the wave, mid
9 In Charlotte Bronts Villette, Lucy has similar dreams of safety under the sea. But Charlotte
Bront also brings a terrible woman out of the sea to revenge herself on the lover who spurned her in
Bronts poem Gilbert.
35
Neptunes woods (180). Her only encounter with hazard involves saving drowning
seamen (when Neptune permits).
If we consider eighteenth-century landscape as representing Gothic liberty and
Roman authority, both of these aspects are certainly absent from the unframed
terrifying landscape that confronts Emily outside of the castle at Udolpho. Emily is
in no sense free (except in her aesthetic ability to frame the landscape), and
authority in Italy at this time appears to be entirely in the hands of the local ruffians.
This landscape seems to Emily as full of banditti as Vauxhall was swarming with
lechers for Evelina. As in the scenes from Burneys novel, this scene is obscure, with
no place to hide or seek and every reason for the heroine to believe she will be raped
or murdered. Toward evening, they wound down precipices, black with forests of
cypress, pine and cedar, into a glen so savage and secluded, that if Solitude ever had
local habitation, this might have been her place of dearest residence. To Emily it
appeared a spot exactly suited to the retreat of banditti (402). The men do not
murder her only because the evil owner of Udolpho does not give this command, but
we know they are certainly capable of doing so, and the landscape feels full of a
dangerous male presence which might easily violate any woman, just as Burneys
more satiric landscapes might. As with Evelina, no zone of compromise exists for
the heroine. Even when the cutthroats arrive at an idyllic cottage on the edge of the
woodone that would ordinarily fit all of Appletons requirements for a perfect
zone of compromiseEmily finds out it is just another temporary prison for her
until they can take her back to Udolpho.
Neither Evelina nor Emily exists in the landscape with true safety. The women
writers of these two novels, Evelina and The Mysteries of Udolpho, vacillate
between trying the old male spectator approach and having their heroines lose
control in a landscape full of potentially violent men. Not only do these women have
little control of their landscape, they are also exploited, in Evelinas case, for her
vulnerability in having no fixed name or property, and in Emilys case, for her
property. In both cases the heroines are the property, the commodities, and yet the
authors (even though they are women) feel forced to follow the controlling
eighteenth-century male property owners traditional view of the landscape. No
wonder women sometimes become confused and lose their control of the landscape.
Of course, the changes occurring in the landscapes of these novels reflect some
of the incipient Romantic attitudes which also influenced Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and the interest in what these authors see as nature, untouched by artifice,
is not unique to their gender. However, the ambivalence over who controls the
landscape and the potential danger of a male presence there trying to objectify
women and convert them into property appear as themes in both these novels by
women, the reverberations of which are felt by women fiction writers up to the
present. As girls at a camp in southern Canada, Atwoods female characters are well
aware that when they pretended to be Indian braves exploring the Canadian
wilderness, eventually their femininity would be exposed to the dangers of being
consumed by the landscape. Searching for prospects and refuges in the landscape of
Jane Austen involves an increasing awareness of women negotiating the pitfalls and
hazards in their landscape. The young women in Austens youthful pieces faint and
then die of landscape, so to speak, but also build a natural sanctuarya place to
hide and a place from which to seek. As Radcliffe, then Austen, and, much later,
36
Atwood, struggle to frame the landscape in stories, they give their female
protagonists a chance to avoid the possibility of stepping aside and becoming lost
forever.
In the next chapter, we will look at Jane Austens earliest attempts at using
landscape. In these youthful fictional pieces, Austens awareness of how landscape
affects heroines may the surprise the reader. Her satire on landscape and how men
and women respond to it ranges from the four equally spaced cows that Mr. Gower
in Evelyn admired to the bower that provides a place of solace for Kitty in
Catharine,Or The Bower. The advice we come away with from one of her most
extended pieces, Love and Freindship, on how to behave in the landscape is fairly
simple: Run mad as often as you choose; but do not faint (122). Thus may a
heroine avoid death by landscape.
37
Chapter 1
3 or 4 Families in a Country Village,

or Naturalists, Novelists, Empiricists,
and Serendipidists
3 or 4 families in a country village1: this phrase by which Jane Austen identifies

the most congenial subject matter for novels as she chose to write them can also
serve to characterize the environment that proved ideal for Charles Darwins
naturalist observations. He found nothing so repaying as to watch the sometimes
cooperative, sometimes competitive inhabitants of a microenvironment, whether his
version of Austens country village happened to be a volcanic Galpagos island, a
nitrogen-deficient bog hospitable to insectivorous plants, or the herbaceous border
at Down House. But besides offering a fertile field of study, the country village
provided both Austen and Darwin with the best place to thrive and to pursue their
chosen projects. Both flourished in the tranquil stability of country life in the south
of England. Hypothetically, the world was all before independently wealthy Darwin;
but with adequate means to live where he would after returning to British terra firma
from the five years Beagle voyage, marrying his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, and
starting a family, he chose neither academic Cambridge nor metropolitan London as
his permanent base. Instead Darwin retired from the hubbub of London to Downe,
a secluded village in Kent, to cultivate his lifelong naturalist investigations. Austen,
an unmarried, unpropertied woman dependent on others for a roof over her head,
never had the luxury of choice but was obliged to live wherever her parents or
a brothers resources provided a home. She passed her life in several placesthe
Hampshire villages of Steventon and Chawton, the spa city Bath, the busy naval port
of Southamptonand paid long visits to other households, notably her brothers.
But Austen found the settled peace crucial to pursuing her art only in village houses:
Steventon Rectory in her early adulthood and Chawton Cottage from 1811 until
the end of her life. Austens mature creative life contains a gap that coincides with
her period of rootless migrations; and her six completed novels principally derive
from two fertile periods of composition, 179699 and 181116. The first period
ended when her father retired and left the parish of Steventon with his wife and two
uprooted daughters. The second began when the Austen women settled at Chawton,
thanks to the generosity of the third Austen brother, Edward Austen Knight.
1 Jane Austen, Jane Austens Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 275. Subsequent citations will refer to this edition, abbreviated
JAL, and will appear parenthetically.
38
Jane Austen & Charles Darwin

Finding sustenance in rural seclusion and being fascinated by the intricate
workings of a small community are only two of a number of ways Austen and
Darwin might be seen as alike. The ensuing pages will explore some of the surprising
similarities and significant contrasts between their lives, works, and ideas. First,
though, its worth briefly stating the main differences. Theres little chronological
overlap: Darwin (180982) was a child when Austen (17751817) died. There are
the obvious differences of sex (a matter much considered by Darwin in various
papers and books) and gender (a phenomenon explored throughout Austens novels).
Theres Darwins wealthy, married paterfamilias status as opposed to Austens
financially constrained spinsterhood. Darwins range of intellectual interests was
global, both geographically and figuratively, whereas Austen focused her attention
on an unusually narrow segment of the human world: the lower reaches of the
English ruling class in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
But despite these significant differences, Austen and Darwin were alike in several
waysways crucially formative to their particular talents. Both sprang from the
provincial English gentry, the social class Austen described in her novels. Both grew
up as younger children in large families, Austen as second daughter and seventh
child in a sibling group of eight, Darwin as second son and fifth child in a sibling
group of six. More important, Austen and Darwin possessed congenial temperaments
and analogous talents worth examining in light of one another. Intriguing blends
of conformity and independence, both were superficially conventional people who
remained, at heart, uncompromisingly determined to keep faith with their respective
vocations as novelist and naturalistvocations that themselves share a number of
attributes. Both Austen and Darwin were keen observers of the world before them,
observers who excelled both in noticing microcosmic particulars and, because they
observed with trained eyes, in discerning the cosmic significance of those small
details.
If human beings and their societies are understood to be part of nature, then it can
be said that both Austen and Darwin are naturalists, for they look with scrupulous,
penetrating, and relatively unbiased attention at the rich and messy details of the
world around them. In a somewhat less literal sense, both Austen and Darwin can
be called novelists. Each relies on storytelling and the verbal skills that it entails
to convey personal observations of new things noticed in specific detail to a wider
world of readers. Each presents character (for Darwins purposes, character is not
only human but also zoological, botanical, or geological) modified by contingencies
and incrementally changed over time. In making their observations and drawing
their conclusions as naturalist or novelist, Austen and Darwin were part of the strong
and flourishing tradition of British empiricismindeed, they might be seen as the
two great British empiricists of the nineteenth century. But mere empiricismand
mere is an adjective often found explicitly or implicitly preceding the nouns
empiricism and empiricist in Englishdoesnt suffice to explain Austens and
Darwins triumphs as novelist and naturalist. Trained sagacity prepared their minds to
profit by the accidental details that observation and chance brought before them. This
blend of strengths makes their respective careers ideal embodiments of serendipity,
a coinage and concept Horace Walpole introduced to English a few decades before
Austens birthand nearly a century before the word scientist appeared in print.
39
Naturalists, Novelists, Empiricists, and Serendipidists

Novelistsnaturalistsempiricistsserendipitists: with all these terms in play,
it would be best to begin with definitions and distinctions. Before turning to Austens
and Darwins minds and sensibilities, the circumstances in which their mental powers
flourished and the subjects with which they fruitfully engaged, lets think about what
naturalist, novelist, empiricist, and serendipitist mean. More precisely, lets
consider how the meanings of these terms have morphed over timefor words, like
the species naturalists observe and the characters novelists chronicle, evolve if they
endure.
Empiricists
Empiricism, at root, was medical practice based upon first-hand experience and
observation as opposed as opposed to esoteric doctrine. Tradition has it that Greek
medicine was first practiced by the Asclepiadiae, a clan of doctors supposedly
descending from the mythic Asclepius and professing knowledge of medical secrets
handed down from their legendary ancestor and transmitted by Hippocrates. The
doctors of the Asclepian school of medicine, established in the fourth century BCE
by Thesalus the son and Polybus the son-in-law of Hippocrates, were known as
the Dogmatici or the Hippocratici. The Empirici, a rival school, arose in the third
century. Founded by Serapion of Alexandria and Philinus of Rhodes, the Empirici
consciously distinguished themselves from the dogmatic proprietors of hereditary
knowledge by basing their practice on experience only. In the first century BCE,
Themison founded the Methodici, a school of medical practice blending the
approaches of the Dogmatici and the Empirici.2
It is interesting to notice that because the positions of the Dogmatici and the
Empirici were absolutist when practical common sense might suggest a variable
blending of the schools approachesexactly what the Methodici eventually did
the terms derived from each schools name, dogmatism and empiricism (but
especially the former) have come to carry pejorative connotations. Because of early
association with the exclusion of theory and the rejection of transmitted knowledge,
the words empiricist and empiricism as used in later times often connote
unscientific practice, ignorance, and quackeryall possible or likely consequences
of experience uninformed by theory or principles. More neutrally, empirical can
signify induction without deductionand thus in math might refer to a formula
arrived at by the accretion of specifics; in chemistry to enumerating a compounds
elements without theorizing on how they are combined; and in psychology to a practice
based on specific observation and experiment instead of general principle. Thus in
nineteenth-century usage empirical in its various forms typically exists in direct
or implied contrast with the terms scientific or rational. The OED specifically
cites James Mill, Mere observation and empiricism, not even the commencement of
scienceand likewise Sir John Herschel, If the knowledge be merely accumulated
2 Thomas Henry Huxley, The Connection of the Biological Sciences with Medicine,
Nature: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science DCXIV (1881), 3426; William Alexander
Greenhill, Medicina, in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities
(London: John Murray, 1875), pp. 7457.
40

experience, the art is empirical. In partial contrast Thomas Henry Huxley, renowned
as Darwins bulldog, wrote in The Connection of the Biological Sciences with
Medicine that All true science begins with empiricism.3 Huxleys pronouncement
continues with a qualifying clause not quoted in the OEDthough all true science
is such exactly, in so far as it strives to pass out of the empirical stage into that of the
deduction of the empirical from more general truths (343)so he too would be no
advocate of mere empiricism.
Serendipitists
The essence of serendipity is accidental sagacity. Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-

century connoisseur and author famed for his Gothic house Strawberry Hill, his Gothic
novel The Castle of Otranto, and his extensive correspondence, coined the word in
a January 28, 1754 letter to Horace Mann. Walpole contextualizes and characterizes
this word hes invented with a blend of acuteness and aristocratic nonchalance: I
once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses
traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things
which they were not in quest of.4 The Eastern tale to which Walpole refers concerns
three princes, sons of the philosopher king Jafer of Sarendip. Highly educated by
the wisest men in their fathers kingdom, the princes are on their travels to gain
direct experience, especially of other peoples and their customs, to complement
their scholastic learning. Its important to notice that although the princes are not
seeking the specific situations and details they happen upon, their travels are not
purposeless. Nor are their minds unprepared. The princes adventures on the road
result in discoveries of the Sherlock Holmes sortdiscoveries crucially involving,
like Holmess, the interplay of two things: accurately noticed evidence and a trained
mind capable of correctly interpreting whats been observed. If the three princes
were classical Greek practitioners of medicine, theyd be Methodici; for they value
and profit by both direct experience and transmitted knowledge.
In a recently published, though long unfinished, monograph called The Travels
and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology
of Science, Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber patiently and elegantly follow the
fortunes of the word serendipity from its invention to the present day, when its
widely but loosely employed. If there are many variant shades of meaning attached
to serendipity, argue Merton and Barber, the apparent ambiguities accurately
represent a fundamental tension in the very idea of accidental discovery,
a tension between the attribution of credit for an unexpected discovery to the discoverer
on the one hand, and to auspicious external circumstances on the other. In general,
3 The passages quoted in the OED are drawn from the following sources: James Mill,
The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817), I, 399; John Herschel,
A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman and John
Taylor, 1830), 71; Huxley, The Connection of the Biological Sciences with Medicine, 343.
4 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 28 January 1754, in Horace Walpoles
Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 20, 4078.
41

modesty demands that the writer understate the factor of genius or special gift in
his own accidental discoveries, and that he stress the contribution made by external
circumstances.5
Walpoles own mannered modesty in bringing the word serendipity to life has been
echoed over the years by succeeding generations of observers and discoverers who
display the trait (among them Austen and Darwin, both notable self-deprecators),
with amateurs being likelier than professionals to downplay sagacity and stress
accident.
Merton himself brought the concept of the serendipity pattern in empirical
research into the professionalized realm of the social sciences in 1946. He pointed out
the scientists unacknowledged serendipitous pattern of observing an unanticipated,
anomalous, and strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a new
theory or for extending an existing theory (xxi). A serendipitist in his own right,
Merton realized from his trained observation of specific details that an element of
creative storytelling exists in seemingly objective scientific reportagethat the
rigorous logic seen as scientific is a fashion or convention whereby the rules of
evidence prevailing at a particular time, rather than the actual sequence of events
or phenomena involved in the derivation of a hypothesis, theory, or law, determine
how a scientific narrative is organized.6 The creative element involved in scientific
reportage has its counterpart in scientific discovery: a distinctively groomed
consciousnesss imagination sparks the eureka moment of enlightenment.
In Science and the Social Order, Bernard Barber emphasizes the role of individual
creative imagination in serendipitous discoveries, where one observer encounters
unexpected details that have been seen but not hitherto noticed as significant by
other investigators and then identifies those details as the components of a pattern.
The previously overlooked particulars are actively noticed, that is, by the scientist
who has carefully studied his problem over a long time and is thereby ready, if he can
create some anticipatory ideas, to take advantage of an unexpected occurrence.7
In this way accidental discovery, though it requires unexpected and anomalous data,
has an element of strategy in it. As Barber sees it, successful scientists, ever alert
for seemingly random details or happenings that may lead to new understandings,
actively cultivate serendipity (2035). Perhaps it goes without saying that artistic
endeavor also cultivates serendipity. Characteristically striking a balance somewhere
between the poles of pure fantasy and straight reportage, the imaginative sensibility
accidentally or deliberately finds phenomena in life and sees, through some blend of
talent, training, and luck, how these phenomena can furnish the materials, subjects,
or downright details of art.
5 Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity:
A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science (Princeton, NJ and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 58. Subsequent citations of this text will be
parenthetical.
6 Merton and Barber, xxii, quoting Mertons earlier book Science, Technology, and
Society in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Howard Fertig [1938], repr. 1970), 220.
7 Bernard Barber, Science and the Social Order (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 204.
Subsequent citation will refer to this edition and will be parenthetical.
42

Naturalist
Like empiricist, this terms multiple and shifting meanings emerge most clearly if
we pay careful attention to distinctions. Used one way, naturalist refers to a student
of material as opposed to spiritual things, or to someone who believes that natural
causes offer sufficient explanation of the world, its origins, and its development. The
latter is the essence of the word as Coleridge employs it in his Aids to Reflection: I
am here speaking in the assumed character of a mere naturalist, to whom no light of
revelation had been vouchsafed.8 But in Coleridges day and earlier, when in fact
many British naturalists were clergymen, the word naturalist could also be used
without the implicit opposition to spiritual and could simply indicate someone
studying natural sciencethe seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth-century
counterpart to what we now call a scientist.
Scientist itself is a word of 1830s coinage that William Whewell introduced
in his History of the Inductive Sciences. In this treatise, Whewell indirectly lays out
some of the newly evolved distinctions between naturalist and scientist. He also
shows the limits on unsupplemented empiricism as a basis for substantial inductive
contributions to knowledge. Induction, in Whewells words, is that process of
collecting general truths from the examination of particular facts. Inductive science,
for him, rests on a dual base: Facts and Ideas; observations of Things without, and
an inward effort of Thought; or, in other words, Sense and Reason.9 Neither sense
nor reason suffices alone. Unallied, sense offers only a practical understanding of
particulars. Ungrounded, reason generates hollow if ingenious abstractions. Thus,
says Whewell, Real speculative knowledge demands the combination of the two
ingredients;--right reason, and facts to reason upon. It has been well said, that
true knowledge is the interpretation of nature; and therefore it requires both the
interpreting mind, and nature for its subject (6). Theres a distinct Jane Austen feel
to Whewells term right reason, which can be imagined as the strength of a well-
trained sensibility reading the world as a document and naming whats to be seen
in that text. Unlike Francis Bacons insistence on fact before theory in science (a
prescriptive sequence endorsed by Darwin in his Autobiography and elsewhere),
Whewells model doesnt specify a necessary order in which thinking and data-
gathering must take placeit only insists that scientific progress must somehow
involve both ideas and facts.
Ideas and facts come together thanks to what we might see as scientific serendipity.
Although he does not directly invoke Horace Walpoles anecdote or use his neologism,
Whewells idea and words alike bear striking resemblance to that original account of
serendipity. In Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Whewell observes, the first and
great instrument by which facts are combined into important and permanent truths
is that peculiar Sagacity which belongs to the genius of a Discoverer; and which,
8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. John
Beer, Vol. IX: Aids to Reflection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 353.
9 William Whewell, Selected Writings on the History of Science, ed. Yehuda Elkana
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5. Subsequent citations will refer to this
edition and will be parenthetical.
43

while it supplies those distinct and appropriate Conceptions which lead to its success,
cannot be limited by rules, or expressed in definitions (210). Whewell, like Walpole,
considers a combination of mental training and sharp observation indispensable to
the discoverers peculiar sagacity, which maximizes the likelihood of what are
commonly spoken of as felicitous and inexplicable strokes of an inventive talent.
What might look like luck to outsiders is theory and fact poised in delicate balance.
Discoveries themselves are not improperly described as happy Guesses (211).
It hardly need be said that the discoverers peculiar sagacity ran strong in
Charles Darwin, who more clearly than any other thinker of his century (or
perhaps any century) manifests what Whewell specifies as the necessary balance
of right reason and facts. David Elliston Allen, whose study The Naturalist in
Britain: A Social History shows how by Darwins time the terms scientist and
naturalist had diverged to characterize different, if complementary, approaches
and preoccupations, refines on the special nature of Darwins way of balancing
reason and facts: an essential basis of Darwins genius was the combination in one
man of two contrasting types that are normally quite separate: as well as a collector
and an observer he was an experimenter and a theorist. In terms of the general run
of naturalists he was thus highly uncharacteristic.10 Although Darwin, young and
old, did combine the contrasting types collector/observer and experimenter/theorist,
their relative proportions changed over his lifetime. He became progressively less
of the former and more of the latter. In fact, Darwins own case could be seen
as the perfect example of the old-school naturalist evolving into the Victorian
scientist. Allens quoted words clearly demonstrate how the significance of
the term naturalist had narrowed by the middle of the nineteenth century. The
newly professional scientists distinguished between their own experimental and
theoretical enterprise and the activities and orientation of the phenomenon-finding,
species-describing, field-based naturalists. Darwins ally Thomas Henry Huxley saw
himself as that newly named being the scientist in a self-conscious way that shows
both his difference from Darwin or Wallace and the shrinking of what naturalist
had come to mean by mid-century: There is very little of the generalist in me
I never collected anything, and species work was a burden to me; what I cared for
was the architectural and engineering part of the business (qtd in Allen, 180). So it
would seem that naturalists became scientists with the rise of the laboratory and
formal experimentation. As science professionalized, the term naturalist came to
refer more narrowly to the amateur, empirical enterprise of collecting curiosities and
amassing specimensand, concurrently, somehow to imply that people characterized
by such interests did not engage in formulating concepts. The term naturalist had
come to mean mere naturalist. But Huxleys self-diagnosis also points to another
and subtler difference between scientist and naturalist: the issue of being self-defined
by what one loves doing. Huxley, a scientist, preferred the large lines of theory
construction; Darwin, whose passion embraced particulars, remained a naturalist,
though anything but mere.
10 David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Allen
Lane, 1976), 176. Subsequent citations will refer to this edition and will be parenthetical.
44

Novelist
Deriving through French from the Latin word for new, the term novelist
originally foregrounded its connection with new things. Novelist commonly
meant innovator in the seventeenth century, news-monger in the eighteenth
century. At the same time, the novelist was a writer of novels, a term that at
first referred to novelties or news and tidings, then more broadly to tales or
short stories such as those of Boccaccio. Starting in the seventeenth century, says
the OED, novel came to mean a fictitious prose narrative or tale of considerable
length (now usually long enough to fill one or more volumes), in which characters
and actions representative of the real life of past or present times are portrayed in a
plot of more or less complexity. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this
term often existed in contrast to romance, which typically referred to a shorter,
less realistic prose work. In much the same way that naturalist is most clearly
understood through distinguishing it from the related term scientist, the novelists
goals and methods become evident in contrast with those of a related fiction-maker,
the writer of romance.
In his classic study The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt concurs with the common
assumption of literary historians that realism is the defining characteristic which
differentiates the work of early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction
such as romances.11 The exact meaning of the term realism has of course itself been
much contested, but within the bounds of Watts argument it refers to the general
way in which the novel presents life rather than any particular content. With realism,
attention shifts from types or abstractions to concrete objects of sense-perception
(11). An observer or chronicler making this shift assumes, with Descartes and Locke,
that an individual discovers truth through sense perceptions. In this way, realism is
to the novelist something close to what empiricism is to the naturalist. For Watt,
the novels first duty is truth to individual experience: since the novelists primary
task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience, attention to any
pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success (13). So
construed, the novelist resists models and theories, which seem to bias ones view
of what is actually there rather than to aid in discovery. This rejection of abstraction
and tradition in favor of experience and observation makes the novel as Jane Austen
read, understood, and deployed it a narrative equivalent of empirical practice or
inductive reasoning. As novelists Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and later Austen
subordinate generic conventions of plot or general human type to the primacy
of individual experience (15) and emphasize particulars rather than universals.
The novel habitually recognizes the detailed distinctiveness of characters and
environments. Realistic particularity governs both characterization and the depiction
of environments. Characters develop and change as they pass through time and
places. Place is solid and credible, not the arbitrary backdrop of romance. Time too
assumes an importance not granted it in romance; and the present state of a character
or environment is the comprehensible result of past actions, events, and choices.
11 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley,
CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 10.
45

In short, as Watt sees the eighteenth-century novel, it offers a full and authentic
report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its
reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned,
the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented
through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary
forms (32). Such a literary task emphasizes seeing clearly, then knowing or naming
rightlya taxonomic impulse that seems to link the novelist to the naturalist.
If we conceive of novelists this way, we will understand their goal as an effort to
create what Raymond Williams, writing about the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century English novel, calls knowable communities. Dispensing with the fantastic
and improbable aspects of romancearbitrarily chosen places that dont align with
geography, history, topography, or climate as generally understood; characters whose
qualities are generic or typical and whose inner lives seem inaccessible, cryptic, or
nonexistent; narratives driven by plot conventions and coincidence rather than the
plausible unfolding of event and consequent development of character over timethe
novelist aims to show that people and their relationships can be rationally understood
in communicable ways. Williams explains that this method depends on a particular
kind of social confidence and experience that the knowable and therefore known
relationships compose and are part of a wholly known social structure, and that in
and through the relationships the persons themselves can be wholly known.12 The
practical significance of Austens 3 or 4 families in a country village involves
just this sort of belief in the knowable, a confidence that links naturalists, novelists,
empiricists, and serendipitists. All assume that human societies and natural
ecosystems alike work in systematic ways that we can discover and understand. We
learn about such systems through close attention to their components, but then what
we have learned about a system as a whole sheds light on its constituent elements.
This way of knowing requires a cold, clear eyefree, insofar as such freedom is
possible, from prejudices, traditions, and pre-existing theories. This eye aims to see
things as they are, and right seeing leads to understood meaning.
The primacy of the eye is important here. John Locke considered thought itself
a visual process; and as Ira Konisberg points out the novel as practiced by Austen
and her eighteenth-century predecessors responded to this new understanding, and
thereby became the dominant literary genre of the period, as it directly confronted
the problem of perception in both its narrative technique and its subject matter.13
12 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970), 15. Williams writes of knowable community in Austens novels in
The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 166: Look back, for a
moment, at the knowable community of Jane Austen. It is outstandingly face-to-face; its crises,
physically and spiritually, are in just these terms: a look, a gesture, a stare, a confrontation;
and behind these, all the time, the novelist is watching, observing, physically recording and
reflecting. That is the whole stancethe grammar of her morality. Yet while it is a community
wholly known, within the essential terms of the novel, it is as an actual community very precisely
selective. Neighbours in Jane Austen are not the people actually living nearby; they are the
people living a little less nearby who, in social recognition, can be visited.
13 Ira Konisberg, Narrative Technique in the English Novel: Defoe to Austen (Hamden,
CT: Archon Books, 1985), 910.
46

This is not to say that novels confine themselves to what the eye can see. Rather,
thought itself is visual in novels. Reading Austens novels, we dont merely see
characters seeing the world. We also see them reacting, internally and externally.
This emphasis on the visual nature of thought corresponds with the empirical or
encyclopedic way of organizing and displaying knowledge in charts or tables, and
with the way naturalists privilege the visual ways of categorizing phenomena, basing
knowledge on criteria verifiable by the unaided or assisted eyein the field, or
through a microscope, or through a telescope.
In 1876, when he was 67 years old, Charles Darwin sketched out an autobiography,
which he revised and amplified over the rest of his life. Though arguably a more artful
text than it admits to being, the autobiographys stated goal is candid appraisal of the
growth of a naturalists mind, mainly for his children and grandchildren. Early in this
narrative, Darwin acknowledges his inclination to share his cousin Francis Galtons
belief that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of any
one, and that most of our qualities are innate.14 Given this belief in nature over nurture,
it is not surprising that Darwin assumed his descendants would value a record of his
intellectual development. Similarly, it would make sense for him to display interest
in understanding the mental powers of his own progenitorsbut whats curious and
intriguing is the selective nature of that interest, which focuses exclusively on his
father and especially his paternal grandfather. In his Autobiography Darwin doesnt
discuss the mental powers of his mother, his grandmothers, or his remarkable maternal
grandfather, the ceramics king Josiah Wedgwoodand elsewhere he shows little if
any concern for these potential contributors to his innate qualities. Why not? Perhaps
his neglect of what the maternal side might have bequeathed to his own mental
development can be explained by a blend of factors. Darwin realized that parental
and grandparental characteristics recurred in subsequent generations; but, unaware
of Mendels work on genetics, he did not understand the mechanism of biological
inheritance. Further, he might have been selectively and unconsciously blinkered
by how his culture understood inheritance as a social and economic phenomenon.
Like his fellow Victorians, Darwin was the product of a patriarchal age when the
transmission of surnames, money, property, and rank characteristically followed the
male line. He might unconsciously assume that the ancestors who made the chief
social and economic contributions to his identityhis name, class, education, and
fortunewould also be the most substantial contributors to his mental inheritance.
Whatever his reasons for the selective attention, Darwin carefully examined the
mental qualities of his paternal grandfather the doctorpoetnatural-philosopher
Erasmus Darwinso famed for facile theory-spinning that Coleridge coined a term,
darwinising, to indicate bold, ambitious speculation of the sort Erasmus practiced
in prose and verse alikeand his father, the highly successful Shrewsbury physician
and capitalist Robert Waring Darwin. These appraisals, like the maternal-side
appraisals he did not make, pose intriguing problems that call for some explanation.
Charles Darwin clearly recognized that his grandfather and father possessed traits
14 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 18091882, ed. Nora Barlow
(New York and London: Norton, 1958), 43. Subsequent citations will refer to this text,
abbreviated A, and will appear parenthetically.
47

and talents resembling some of his ownand he was well aware that his grandfather
had preceded him in articulating the idea that living things evolve. But in both his
autobiography and his memoir of Erasmus Darwin, Charles seems almost to go out
of his way to distinguish his grandfathers and fathers minds from hisand he
unambiguously denies that his grandfathers evolutionary theories had any influence
on his own. Of course, members of a younger generation characteristically feel a
psychological need to rebel against, or at least declare independence from, their
progenitors. But the case is considerably more complex than usual in the Darwin
psychodrama, as we shall see.
Charles Darwin characterized his grandfather Erasmuss mind this way: Judging
from his published works, letters, and all that I have been able to gather about
him, the vividness of his imagination seems to have been one of his pre-eminent
characteristics. This led to his great originality of thought, his prophetic spirit both
in science and in the mechanical arts, and to his overpowering tendency to theorise
and generalise.15 Charles goes on to grant that Erasmus valued experimental
verification of hypotheses, possessed uncommon powers of observation, and
attended to a surprising range of subjectsbut, like Coleridge, Charles sees the
incessant activity or energy of his mind as Erasmuss dominant quality (ED 49).
Charless self-analysis recognized this mental energy as a quality he too possessed.
His notebooks show that he read his grandfathers evolution-espousing Zoonomia as
he was beginning to assemble his own thoughts on evolution. Yet he totally rejected
the possibility that his ideas or chosen topics were influenced by his grandfathers.
The confident vigor of this rejection seems to have risen mainly out of Charles
Darwins empirical streak.
His own mind was, like Erasmuss, capable of both observing and theorizingbut
it was weighted towards valuing scrupulous observation. To Charles Darwin, patient
accumulation and close examination of evidence constituted a necessary prelude to
valid speculation: his wife Emma reported one of his favorite sayings as being, It
is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so
useful afterwards (A 159). From such a vantage point it would seem that Erasmus
Darwin, Lamarck, Chambers, and most other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
evolutionists had not earned the right to theorize. Because Charles Darwin based
his own theoretical contribution on laboriously accumulated observation and could
bring himself publicly to avow evolution only after he had identified a mechanism
by which it could plausibly proceednatural selection, a process about which
Erasmus says nothinghe felt justified in denying any influence of his grandfathers
evolutionary ideas upon his own. Erasmus may have interested himself in some
strikingly similar topics, but his prophetic speculations held no credibility with a
grandson who demanded that empirical observation precede and undergird theory.16
15 Charles Darwin, The Works of Charles Darwin, eds Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman,
Vol. XXIX: Erasmus Darwin by Ernst Krause, with a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin
(New York: New York University Press, 1989), 22. Subsequent citation will refer to this reprint
of the 1879 John Murray edition, will be abbreviated ED, and will appear parenthetically.
16 Nora Barlow incisively appraises the common ground shared by Erasmus and Charles
Darwin, and the grandsons reasons for not seeing the extent of their similarity, in On Charles
48

Darwin asserts that his father Robert Waring Darwin, although he followed in
Erasmuss footsteps and became a highly successful physician,
did not inherit any aptitude for poetry or mechanics, nor did he possess, as I think,
a scientific mind I cannot tell why my fathers mind did not appear to me fitted for
advancing science; for he was fond of theorizing, and was incomparably the most acute
observer whom I ever knew. But his powers in this direction were exercised almost wholly
in the practice of medicine, and in the observation of human character. He intuitively
recognized the disposition or character, and even read the thoughts, of those with whom
he came into contact with extraordinary acuteness. (ED 37)
It seems clear that even if Darwin cannot tell why his father failed to seem scientific
to him, his next sentence implies the reason, which is the same for his disavowal
of Erasmuss influence. For Charles, scientific theory could not legitimately exist
without a solid foundation of facts supporting (if not proving) it. Such facts could be
gathered only through a broad and deep observation of the natural world. Roberts
acute observations and intuitions, centered on people he knew and especially those
he treated, were too narrowly focused to be those of a scientist as understood
by Charles.
The Autobiography takes a tack similar to the account in the memoir of Erasmus
and praises Roberts talents in areas useful to scientific naturalists: His chief mental
powers were his powers of observation and his sympathy, neither of which have I
ever seen exceeded or even equaled (A 29). Again, however, Charles emphatically
denies a scientific character to Roberts powerful mind: My fathers mind was
not scientific, and he did not try to generalise his knowledge under general laws;
yet he formed a theory for almost everything which occurred. I do not think that
I gained much from him intellectually (A 42). Here again, the missing element
seems to have been empirical study of the natural world and systematic, responsible
movement from the particular to the general. Because Robert Darwins remarkable
powers of observation were bent only on his fellow human beings, in his sons eyes
hed not paid the dues to be called scientific.
Let us now turn to Darwins self-scrutiny in the Autobiography. The retrospective
Charles did not see himself as a particularly promising child, though several of the
qualities evident in his boyhoodstrong and diversified tastes, much zeal for
whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject
or thing (A 43)furnished rich raw materials from which a naturalists character
might be formed. His early, apparently aimless passions for field sports and beetle-
collecting did not suit him for academic distinction in the classical imitatio that
prevailed at Shrewsbury School, or for Edinburghs medical courses centered on
lectures he found tedious and dissection he found distasteful, or for Cambridges
curriculum focused on the training of future Anglican clergy. But his formal education
had the advantage of putting him in touch with like-minded men whose sensibilities
and accomplishments offered congenial models. Describing his Cambridge mentor
John Stevens Henslow, Darwin might have been speaking of himself: His strongest
Darwin and his Grandfather Dr Erasmus Darwin, Part One of the Appendix to her edition of
the Autobiography, 14966.
49

taste was to draw conclusions from long-continued minute observations (A 64).
Similarly, Darwins story of a large tropical volute shell found in a gravel pit near
Shrewsbury, a tale he told to the Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick, beautifully
captures his sudden awareness of what science could do and how it worked as a
mental discipline:
Whilst examining an old gravel-pit near Shrewsbury a labourer told me that he had found
in it a large worn tropical Volute shell, such as may be seen on the chimney-pieces of
cottages; and as he would not sell the shell I was convinced that he had really found it
in the pit. I told Sedgwick of the fact, and he at once said (no doubt truly) that it must
have been thrown away by someone into the pit; but then added, if really embedded there
it would be the greatest misfortune to geology, as it would overthrow all that we know
about the superficial deposits of the midland counties. These gravel-beds belonged in
fact to the glacial period, and in after years I found in them broken arctic shells. But I
was then utterly astonished at Sedgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a
tropical shell being found near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had
ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science
consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
(A 6970)
Whatever his country pastimes and Cambridge associations may have contributed,
Darwin believed that he owed his minds first real training to the Beagle voyage,
itself made possible through Cambridge contacts. Aboard and ashore, Darwin
recollected, I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus
my powers of observation were improved, though they were already fairly developed
(A 77). Throughout the five years of the voyage Darwin tirelessly collected animal
and plant specimens, but he believed that his geological investigation of the places
he visited was far more important because geological observation immediately
called for reasoning:
On first examining a new district nothing can appear more hopeless than the chaos of
rocks; but by recording the stratification and nature of the rocks and fossils at many points,
always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn
on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible. (A 77)
Geology again offered the key when, back home in England, Darwin decided to
embark on the ambitious project that was to last him a lifetime, understanding
the variation of plants and animals under domestication and in nature. Darwin
resolved to follow the example of Sir Charles Lyell, whose first volume of Principles
of Geology had shaped his Beagle geologizing, and determined to collect all facts
bearing on the problem of variation. Darwin began his first variation notebook in
July 1837: I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected
facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions,
by printed enquiries, by conversation with skilful breeders and gardeners, and by
extensive reading (A 119). This wholesale fact-gathering of course included first-
hand observation and experimentation along with second-hand research. Its personal
consequence, as understood by Darwin, seems to have been the evolution of his
own mind, a strengthening of regularly exercised faculties and weakening of those
50

neglected: My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general
laws out of large collections of facts (A 139). The price Darwin believed he paid for
this specialization was a loss or diminution of imaginative and aesthetic pleasures
that formerly had delighted him: poetry, Shakespeare, pictures, music, scenery. On
the other hand, he confesses, novels which are works of the imagination, though
not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me,
and I often bless all novelists (A 138). It may be that Darwins escapist way of using
novelshe liked them read aloud to him, preferred happy endings, delighted in a
character whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better
(A 139)explains the endurance of this taste. But it may also be that the shared
approaches and goals of naturalist and novelist allowed novels to continue appealing
to Darwin after other less empirically grounded aesthetic pleasures had paled.
The Autobiographys interpretation of Darwins mental qualities is
characteristically modest and self-deprecatory, though it stoutly refutes some critics
claims that Oh, he is a good observer, but has no power of reasoning. I do not
think that this can be true, for the Origin of Species is one long argument from the
beginning to the end, and it has convinced not a few able men (A 140).
Darwin reports that he has become a little more skilful in guessing right
explanations and in devising experimental tests; but this may probably be the result
of mere practice, and of a larger store of knowledge (A 136). On the other hand,
verbal facility does not seem to have come with practice, though Darwin believes
that his self-diagnosed deficiency in expression is offset by a consequent advantage
in cognition: I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and
concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time; but it has had
the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every
sentence, and thus I have been often led to see errors in reasoning and in my own
observations or those of others (A 136). Perhaps Darwins self-deprecation here
refers to spontaneous rather than laboriously crafted fluency. If not, the modesty
is somewhat disingenuous; for the end results of Darwins rhetorical struggles
are always serviceable and sometimes brilliant. Throughout his published works,
Darwins careful qualification of claims and canny hedging of hypotheses prudently
contrast with the confidence and precision of his observation and description of details.
A shrewd strategist, he excels in the arrangement of particulars and generalizations
whether within paragraphs, chapters, and complete works or at the metalevel, in the
sequenced pursuit and publication of his intellectual projects, one example being
his decision to follow the abstract argument of Origin of Species (1859) with the
empirically detailed monograph On the Various Contrivances by Which British
Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (1862).17
His habitual narrative tone of commonsensical modesty, the voice of an exhaustively
17 Writing to his publisher John Murray on the subject of the orchid book on September
24, 1861, Darwin observed, I think this little volume will do good to the Origin, as it
will show that I have worked hard at details, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, eds
Frederick H. Burkhardt, Sidney Smith, Duncan M. Porter, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), IX, 29. Subsequent citations of Darwins letters will refer to this
edition, abbreviated CCD, and will be parenthetical.
51

well-informed, sagacious everyman, perfectly captures Darwins distinctive blend of
empirical caution and speculative ambition, in published and private writings alike.
As he nears the end of his Autobiography, Darwin lays out his ruling qualities in
a tone of detachment and humility:
On the favourable side of the balance, I think that I am superior to the common run of
men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My
industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection
of facts. What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and
ardent From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain
whatever I observed,that is, to group all facts under some general laws. These causes
combined have given me the patience to reflect or ponder for any number of years over
any unexplained problem. As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead
of other men. I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any
hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject),
as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. Indeed I have had no choice but to act in
this matter, for with the exception of the Coral Reefs, I cannot remember a single first-
formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified. This
has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences. On the
other hand, I am not very skeptical (A 14041)
Darwin sees himself as able to put these qualities of mind to efficient use thanks to
methodical habits, the financial independence that has freed him from having to earn
a living, and even his ill-health, which has insulated him from distractions even if it
has also diminished his productivity (A 144). He concludes by attributing his success
as a man of science to a complex and various array of traits:
Of these the most important have beenthe love of scienceunbounded patience in long
reflecting over any subjectindustry in observing and collecting factsand a fair share
of invention as well as of common-sense. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is
truly surprising that thus I should have influenced to a considerable extent the beliefs of
scientific men on some important points. (A 145)
Unlike Charles Darwin the autobiographer, Jane Austen never appraised her
qualities of mind or her operating principles in a systematic or extensive way. She
wrote little about the novelists art in general or about her own particular ways of
practicing it. Apart from whats demonstrated in her literary works themselves, what
we can discern of her values, precepts, and strengths as a novelist comes principally
from her letters; and much of the time we are obliged to operate by inference when
reading them. Austens published letters have sometimes disappointed readers
who hope for something loftier, more speculative, and more literary rather than
the prosaic, detail-dense bulletins she tends to dispatch.18 Such readerly hopes
and disappointments, though natural, are at heart unreasonable. Austen lived the
sort of life she lived, and she wrote the sort of letters she and her correspondents
18 Jane Austens letters, as her editor Deirdre LeFay points out, were heavily weeded
and censored by her sister Cassandra, who was likelier to destroy entire letters than to excise
individual portions, though to the regret of subsequent generations she did both.
52

(by far the most prominent among them her sister Cassandra) valued. That ought
to be enough. As readers of early-nineteenth-century British correspondence, we
should not be disappointed that Austen isnt as aesthetically speculative a letter-
writer as John Keats or as amusingly confessional yet artful a correspondent as Lord
Byron, any more than we should reproach or congratulate her for not having lived
the life either Keats or Byron chose for himself.
Austens penchant for close, clear observationthe skilled naturalists eye
trained on human societypervades her letters. A typical passage of observation
occurs in her Friday 2 September 1814 letter from London to her friend Martha
Lloyd, then sojourning at Bath:
I am amused by the present style of female dress;the coloured petticoats with braces
over the white Spencers & enormous Bonnets upon the full stretch, are quite entertaining.
It seems to me a more marked change than one has lately seen.Long sleeves appear
universal, even as Dress, the Waists short, and as far as I have been able to judge, the
Bosom covered.I was at a little party last night at Mrs Latouches, where dress is a good
deal attended to, & these are my observations from it.Petticoats short, & generally, tho
not always, flounced.The broad-straps belonging to the Gown or Boddice, which cross
the front of the Waist, over white, have a very pretty effect I think. (JAL 273)
This close attention to minutiaeanalogous, one might say, to Darwins fascination

with the diverse and fanciful variety in breeds of domestic pigeons19indicates
genuine interest. It also displays sensitivity to her audiences expectations, for
one thing cherished by women living in country villages as did Jane Austen and
Martha Lloyd was current intelligence of what fashions prevailed in sophisticated
metropolitan circles. Although Austen was skilled at noticing and transmitting
such trivial details, she apparently did not ascribe much value to female or male
preoccupation with fashions in dress or personal accessories. Her novels contain
little taxonomy of gowns or greatcoats, and when a character displays explicit
interest in clothing or adornment, the trait is heavily ironized. Only the likes of dim-
witted matrons like Mrs Bennet and Mrs Allen, shallow materialists like Augusta
Hawkins Elton and Isabella Thorpe, simple-minded ingnues like Harriet Smith,
and dunderheads like Mr Rushworth with his pink satin cape for Lovers Vows or
Robert Ferrars with his obsessive concern for the design specifications of a bespoke
toothpick-case display overt concern with the minutiae of fashion that constitute
the substance of Austens epistolary report; though of course any Austen heroine
pronounced elegant must pay some attention to such matters beyond the frame of
the narrative. Prosaic details in general receive this sort of double-edged treatment in
Austenworld, where it seems that admirable characters have the material concerns of
their lives well regulated and hence should be understood as having given a certain
amount of attention to thembut where putting ones attentiveness to small details
into words is nearly always presented as a laughable quality, most pronounced in
the case of Emmas Miss Bates, whos apparently incapable of stemming the flow of
19 Darwin treats domestic pigeons in Chapters V and VI of The Variation of Animals and
Plants under Domestication, ed. Harriet Ritvo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998, repr. of the 1883 second edition), 137235.
53

what Austen, in a letter advising her niece Anna Austen on novel-writing, called too
many particulars of right hand & left (JAL 275). But more of this anon.
Observations on fictionAustens own principles and practices or those of her
fellow novelistsare much less commonly encountered in her letters than are the
minute particulars of real life as lived by those people among whom she passed
her time. Her clearest statements on novels and their composition appear in letters
to members of the younger generation of Austens who shared their Aunt Janes
penchant for fiction-writing. Letters throughout the autumn of 1814 discuss a novel
being written by her niece Anna Austen, who was married in November to Ben
Lefroy. Austen pays Annas manuscript the compliment of reading it carefully and
taking it seriously. She mainly offers feedback and advice centered on specific details
of character, incident, motivation, and word choice. A few examples:
We are not satisfied with Mrs Fs settling herself as Tenant & near Neighbour to such a
Man as Sir T. H. without having some other inducement to go there; she ought to have
some friend living thereabouts to tempt her. (JAL 2745)
Susan ought not to be walking out so soon after Heavy rains, taking long walks in the dirt.
An anxious Mother would not suffer it. (JAL 275)
Newton Priors is really a Nonpareil.Milton wd have given his eyes to have thought of
it.Is not the Cottage taken from Tollard Royal? (JAL 276)
Devereux Foresters being ruined by his Vanity is extremely good; but I wish you would
not let him plunge into a vortex of Dissipation. I do not object to the Thing, but I cannot
bear the expression;it is such thorough novel slangand so old, that I dare say Adam
met with it in the first novel he opened. (JAL 277)
Austens overarching valueskeeping faith with plausibility as empirical

observation understands it, deriving details from real life, relying on fresh language
rather than cant phrasesare not announced but to be inferred inductively. Her first
letter, of Friday 9 to Sunday 18 September 1814 does, however, offer Anna two key
principles:
You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as
is the delight of my life;3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work
on& I hope you will write a great deal more, & make full use of them while they are so
very favourably arranged. You are but now coming to the heart & beauty of your book; till
the heroine grows up, the fun must be imperfect (JAL 275)
These remarks to Anna straightforwardly reveal Austens own preferencesbut

interestingly, a close look at her words shows that one of these preferences has
particularly close relevance to her current project. Throughout her novels, Austens
center-staging of unmarried but marriageable characters, with children relegated to
bit parts and married adults to supporting roles, is undeniable; and all her novels
follow this precept, restated later in the paragraph: One does not care for girls till
they are grown up (JAL 276). Her avowed delight in working on the interaction
of a handful of village families more accurately characterizes Emma, which she was
54

writing in 1814, than any of her other works. Nonetheless, the formula loosely fits
all six published novels. Sense and Sensibilitys Dashwood sisters are uprooted from
one country neighborhood (not to say village), transplanted to another, then taken
on their travels to London; so theirs is not so much a chronicle of settled village
life as a discovery of new places and people. Pride and Prejudices Bennet sisters
inhabit such a neighborhood, but it becomes worth writing about at the very moment
when characters from the outside world arrive to shake things up and, in partial
consequence, the individual Bennets gain chances to travel to other places (rural
Kent, London, Derbyshire, Brighton). Northanger Abbeys Catherine Morland,
having just grown up, is dislodged from her village home and allowed to turn fresh
eyes on the delights of Bath and the gothic charms of the novels namesake country
house. Mansfield Parks Fanny Price, saved from urban squalor by being sent away
from home, matures in a closed-off country-house world that for years seems to
contain only two related familiesthe landowning Bertrams and the Norrises at the
Parsonageuntil death and debt bring new tenants and their relations. In Persuasion
Anne Elliots story, like Fannys, involves exilethis time from, not to, a country-
house neighborhood, with new experiences and perspectives contingent on Annes
re-situation at Uppercross, Lyme Regis, and Bath. Allowing for these variations on
the basic theme, 3 or 4 families in a country village is a formula that fits Austens
fiction.
In contrast to her uninflected, highly particular advice to Anna, Austens remarks
of Monday 16 to Tuesday 17 December 1816 to Annas brother James Edward Austen,
also trying his hand at novel-writing, seem arch and edgy. Austen offers her nephew
an obviously facetious recommendation of plagiarism, particularly amusing in that
it comes from a clergymans daughter who never put a sermon into one of her novels
and it goes to a clergymans son: Uncle Henry writes very superior Sermons.You
& I must try to get hold of one or two, & put them into our Novels;it would be
a fine help to a volume; & we could make our Heroine read it aloud of a Sunday
Evening (JAL 323). One cant help but wonder if this whimsical suggestion
doesnt contain an oblique slam at another sermon-writer, James Edwards father
James, the eldest Austen son, who took over Steventon parish from his father and
thus displaced his sister Jane from her settled home without intending to do so. Are
Jamess sermons inferior to Henrys by implication? Is it a compliment for real-life
sermons to be considered worth stealing by a comic-ironic novelist of Austens sort?
In any case, James Edwards own style of novel must have been quite different
from his aunts, as becomes clear when Austen recurs to the matter of prose-theft,
though in a different situation. She laments over her nephews having lost part of his
manuscript:
Bye the bye, my dear Edward, I am quite concerned for the loss your Mother mentions
in her Letter; two Chapters & a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that I have
not been at Steventon lately, & therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them;two
strong twigs & a half towards a Nest of my own, would have been something.I do not
think however that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should
I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow?How could I
possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so
fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour? (JAL 323)
55

However humorously self-deprecatory the invocation of stereotypesdainty,
feminine Jane deferring to robust, virile Edwardthis passage has the potential to
seem patronizing, perhaps even a bit unpleasant. Unless Edward were a pompous
youth remarkably unappreciative of his aunts published brilliance and even more
infatuated than adolescent writers tend to be with his own apprentice efforts, he
would very likely have squirmed at the irony. Over the years Austens memorable
metaphor little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory has often been wrenched from its
epistolary frame and read uninflected, as Austens sincere self-characterization as a
literary miniaturist. But the delicate balance of self-disclosure and misleading pose
is what makes the passage worth considering and remembering. Austen understands
full well how limited and perhaps trivial her chosen field of fiction-writing looks
from certain vantage points, such as those of romancers, philosophers, moralizers,
generalizers, practitioners of what Sir Walter Scott (with self-deprecation equal
to Austens) called the big Bow-wow.20 But from her perspective, that of the
empirical novelistnaturalist, a small fields well worth intensive labor. Charles
Darwin, barnacle boy and earthworm impresario, would agree with her.
The blend of irony and honesty, self-deprecation and self-confidence detectable
in the letter to James Edward Austen is more continuously and unambiguously
evident in Austens correspondence with James Stanier Clarke, though the recipient
himself, a man apparently tone-deaf to wryness, seems to have missed it. Clarke
as self-presented in his letters to Austen seems uncannily like a comic clergyman
Austen might have invented. In his role as Domestic Chaplain and Librarian to the
Prince of Wales, Clarke had informed Austen that she was at liberty to dedicate any
of her works to HRH the PRand Emma, being the work then in progress, was duly
dedicated to the Prince. Having gained his pointone a courteous subject could not
decently refuse to grant the RegentClarke couldnt help offering Austen advice
for subsequent novels in a letter of Thursday 16 November 1815. Without directly
suggesting his own suitability as a protagonist, he asks Austen to delineate in some
future Work the Habits of Life and Character and enthusiasm of a Clergymanwho
should pass his time between the metropolis & the Country Fond of, & entirely
engaged in Literatureno mans Enemy but his own. Pray dear Madam think of
these things (JAL 2967).
Austens reply of Monday 11 December 1815 should have been seen as an
unanswerable demurral:
I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a Clergyman as you

gave the sketch of in your note of Nov: 16. But I assure you I am not. The comic part of
the Character I might be equal to, but not the Good, the Enthusiastic, the Literary. Such
a Mans Conversation must at times be on subjects of Science & Philosophy of which I
20 This phrase comes from a journal entry of March 14, 1826, where Scott mentions
reading Pride and Prejudice for at least the third time: That young lady has a talent for
describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the
most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow Wow strain I can do myself like any now going
but the exquisite truth which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting
from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me, Walter Scott, Journal of
Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 114.
56

know nothingor at least be occasionally abundant in quotations & allusions which a
Woman, who like me, knows only her own Mother-tongue & has read very little in that,
would be totally without the power of giving.A Classical Education, or at any rate, a
very extensive acquaintance with English Literature, Ancient & Modern, appears to me
quite Indispensable for the person who wd do any justice to your ClergymanAnd I think
I may boast myself to be, with all possible Vanity, the most unlearned, & uninformed
Female who ever dared to be an Authoress. (JAL 306)
But Clarke couldnt drop the subject. He responded on Thursday [?]21 December
1815. Clarkes letter begins with some tactless bustling about Emma, remarkable
given his previous praise of her work: You were very good to send me Emma
which I have in no respect deserved. It is gone to the Prince Regent. I have read only
a few Pages which I very much admired. Having admitted that hes not taken time
for more than the merest sampling of the novel Austen has dedicated according to his
suggestions and sent his way, Clarke reverts to directing Austen on what she should
tackle next:
Do let us have an English Clergyman after your fancymuch novelty may be introduced
shew dear Madam what good would be done if Tythes were taken away entirely, and
describe him burying his own motheras I didbecause the High Priest of the Parish
in which she dieddid not pay her remains the respect he ought to do. I have never
recovered the Shock. Carry your Clergyman to Sea as the Friend of some distinguished
Naval Character about a Court (JAL 307)
So goes the formerly seagoing clerical courtiers effort to elicit Austens interest and
direct her genius. But he recognizes that besides offering himself to the provincial
novelist as a potential model, he might also extend the use of his urban library:
Pray, dear Madam, remember, that besides My Cell at Carlton House, I have another
which Dr Barne procured for me at No 37, Golden Squarewhere I often hide myself.
There is a small Library there much at your Serviceand if you can make the Cell render
you any service as a sort of Half-way House when you come to TownI shall be most
happy. There is a Maid Servant of mine always there. (JAL 307)
The diction (especially Cell) and the level of detail (especially the prim mention
of the ever-present, potentially chaperoning Maid Servant) are wonderfully oily
enough to have come from the mouth of Mr Collins himself. But they didnt, and
unfortunately Austens reply doesnt exist.
It cannot have been too crushing, though, for a few months later Clarke wrote
to offer yet another idea that flatters his own consequence while purporting to serve
Austens novel-writing interests:
The Prince Regent has just left us for London; and having been pleased to appoint me
Chaplain and Private English Secretary to the Prince of Cobourg, I remain here with
His Serene Highness & a select Party until the Marriage [of Prince Leopold to Princess
Charlotte]. Perhaps when you again appear in print you may chuse to dedicate your
Volumes to Prince Leopold: any Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the
august house of Cobourg, would just now be very interesting. (JAL 311)
57

This inspiration, as self-inflating for Clarke as it is uncongenial to Austens talent,
must have made her laugh inside; but she keeps a straight faceor at least what
Clarke might take for onein her reply:
You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of Composition which might recommend
me at present, & I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance, founded on the House
of Saxe Cobourg might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity, than such
pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal inbut I could no more write a
Romance than an Epic Poem.I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance
under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep
it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung
before I had finished the first Chapter.NoI must keep to my own style & go on in my
own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should
totally fail in any other. (JAL 312)
Recognizing and acknowledging her strengths and limitations, Austen affirms her
generic allegiance to the fictional species called noveland her subgenre, the novel
of domestic country lifeas opposed to the romance. She most explicitly avows the
value of the genre to which her talents are best adapted in a long digression found
in Chapter V of Northanger Abbey, perhaps the most sustained example the novels
display of Austen speaking more or less straightforwardly in her own voice.
The passage comes just after the narrator has reported that Isabella and Catherine
shut themselves up, to read novels together. Its worth quoting in full:
Yes, novels;for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with
novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the
number of which they are themselves addingjoining with their greatest enemies in
bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be
read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over
its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the
heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve
of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and
over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now
groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions
have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary
corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride,
ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities
of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and
publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the
Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,there seems
almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist,
and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend
them. I am no novel readerI seldom look into novelsDo not imagine that I often read
novelsIt is really very well for a novel. Such is the common cant.And what are you
reading, Miss _____? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays
down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.It is only Cecelia, or
Camilla, or Belinda; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the
58

mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest
delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the
world in the best chosen language.21
A work demanding the greatest powers of the mind, most thorough knowledge
of human nature, happiest delineation of its varieties, liveliest effusions of wit
and humour, and best chosen language is a worthy task indeed. That Austen
could see the novel this way says as much about her mind as it does about the form
itself. Second- or third-rate novelists might fail in one count or in all of thembut
a discipline that ideally makes use of such varied and important powers is bound to
both earn the respect and showcase the talents of an empirical naturalist with a ready
wit and a way with words.
Naturalists and novelists interested in knowable communities must frame
their studies with care. Too narrow a frame and one risks observing anomaly or
unconnected detail. Too large a frame and the patterns formed by particulars are lost
in a vistas vast sweep. The poetartistengraver William Blake, a philosophical and
political idealist who also, thanks to his incarnationalism, also had his feet firmly
planted on the ground, voices the dream or necessity of linking great and small.
Well-known lines (12) from Auguries of Innocence articulate his aspiration To
see the World in a Grain of Sand/ And Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in
the Palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an Hour. Blake makes this point more
abstractly in Jerusalem (plate 91, ll. 2021) he who wishes to see a Vision; a
perfect Whole,/ Must see it in its Minute Particularsand in A Pretty Epigram
(ll. 12) Nature and Art in this together Suit/ What is Most Grand is always
most Minute.22 A visionary, Blake need not offer a pedestrian means of getting from
minute particulars to the perfect whole. But, as Austen and Darwin later would, one
of his contemporaries, the eighteenth-century geologist James Hutton, understood
how to get the scale of a study right. In Theory of the Earth, Hutton clearly outlines
the advantages of a small-scale yet representative study as he explains why the Isle
of Arran off the coast of Scotland served as an ideal case in point for his British
mineral survey. Hutton began by knowing only
that there were most eminent alpine appearances on that island, as seen from a distance;
that there was granite in those mountains; and that there were, besides, in the island, coal
and limestone. But these, in an island of that extent, were sufficient to make it a proper
subject of natural history, and interesting as leading to the knowledge of the original
constitution of our land. The island of Britain is a country too great for that purpose; that
of Arran, considering its extent, is not too little.23
21 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. R. W. Chapman (London and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1933, repr. 1972), 378. This quotation comes from Chapmans third revised
edition of The Novels of Jane Austen, as will all other quotations from her novels. Subsequent
citations will use the abbreviation NA and will be parenthetical.
22 William Blake, Complete Poems and Prose, ed. David V. Erdmann (Berkeley, CA and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 490, 251, 513.
23 James Hutton, James Hutton in the Field and the Study (Delmar, NY: Scholars
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1997), 199200. Subsequent citations will be parenthetical.
59

Hutton continues that a naturalist able to recognize Arrans mineral evidence as
sufficient to lead to the knowledge of all that is necessary in the production of the
land, or the surface of the earth, as a habitable world will find the islands small
size a manifest advantage. Arrans geology can be understood empirically, but
the process doesnt end there. The islands fully comprehensible yet representative
nature makes it what we might think of as a geological metonym. Thus systematic
principles can be inductively derived from the empirically observed data in such
a way that close study of Arran can serve either of two larger purposes: theory-
making or theory-testing, in Huttons words either forming a theory to be applied
to other parts unknown or trying the justness of a theory formed from the various
appearances collected from the different parts of the earth (200).
Recognizing when one has found a set of minute particulars that will lead,
gradually and incrementally, to the perfect, or even proximate, whole it represents
in metonym requires the serendipitists trained sagacity as well as the empiricists
clear eye. When in September 1835 the Beagle reached the Galpagos Islands far
off the coast of Ecuador, the evidence of how geographical separation allows the
individual constituents of a species to diverge over time into distinctly identifiable
varieties lay right before Darwin, who had stumbled upon some perfect knowable
communitiesas did the evidence of how members of a species can vary though the
generations to fill different, highly specialized niches in an ecosystem. But as Darwin
explored several of the Galpagos Islands (most thoroughly the island the English
called James and the Spanish Santiago, where he and a small party disembarked for
a week) and collected specimens, he was not yet prepared to fathom the significance
of what he saw and gathered. Unlike the fabled Princes of Serendip, he did not at the
time have a mind prepared to grasp the significance of the particulars he saw.
Though called las islas Encantadas, the enchanted isles, by their Spanish
colonizers, the Galpagos do not enchant the eye in a conventional way. Bare, black
shores of cooled and contorted lava, dark sand beaches, intermittently productive
volcanic cones, and generally sparse, scrubby vegetation give the equatorial
archipelago a look of the inferno rather than of the tropical paradise the novelist
Kurt Vonnegut imagines the archipelago becoming a million years hence. But the
Galpagos are a naturalists heaven, for their oddly assorted ecosystem contains a
number of plant and animal species found nowhere else. As Darwin observes in
his narrative of the Beagle voyage, published in 1839, when work had begun on
classifying the specimens he had brought home in 1836, the Galpagos archipelago
seems to be a little world within itself; the greater number of its inhabitants,
both vegetable and animal, being found nowhere else.24 But Darwin recognized
that these unique species were obviously related to other, familiar species; and the
surprising thing was that the Galpagos plants and animals more closely resembled
those of the South American mainland than those inhabiting the Cape Verde islands,
a comparable equatorial island group off the west coast of Africa whose plants and
animals in turn were similar to those of continental Africa.
24 Charles Darwin, The Works of Charles Darwin, eds Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman,
Vols II and III of Journal of Researches (New York: New York University Press, 1987), II,
356. Subsequent citations will be parenthetical and will use the abbreviation JR.
60

This resemblance of offshore island species to their continental neighbors
rather than to the inhabitants of similar offshore islands in more distant parts of
the world perplexed Darwin, who at the time of the Beagle voyage and for some
years afterward still largely adhered to the biblical account of God creating each
species distinctly. It was hard to understand why God would choose to make such
dissimilar life forms to occupy habitats as similar as the Cape Verde and Galpagos
islands. A more rational explanation lay in the evolutionary hypothesis that mainland
species had traveled by air or water to the islands, established isolated populations
that diverged from their mainland relatives, and over time become new varieties
and species; but in 1839, when his Beagle collections had not been fully examined,
the diplomatic Darwin was not willing to go too far into the realms of speculation.
We may infer, he said,
that with the exception of a few wanderers, the organic beings found on this archipelago
are peculiar to it; and yet their general form strongly partakes of an American character.
This similarity in type, between distant islands and continents, while the species are
distinct, has scarcely been sufficiently noticed. The circumstance would be explained,
according to the views of some authors, by saying that the creative power had acted
according to the same law over a wide area. (JR II, 371)
Writing solely for himself as he was cataloging ornithological specimens on the

Beagles journey home, Darwin jotted down a bolder conjecture based on the
island-to-island differences that he had noted in mockingbirds and on similar
distinctions the Spanish Galpagos residents could discern in tortoises: If there is
the slightest foundation for these remarks, the zoology of Archipelagoeswill be
well worth examining; for such facts undermine the stability of species. And in a
typical rhetorical gesture, whether motivated by empirical precision or self-policing
prudence, he inserted a would before undermine.25
For many years, a vivid and enduring myth held that the Galpagos finches were
the crucial species in Darwins speculative drama, and that observing them led him
to an evolutionary epiphany on the spot. Not so, as Frank Sulloway convincingly
demonstrated in a series of 198284 articles on the Galpagos finches, the Beagle
voyage, and Darwins conversion from a creationist to an evolutionist who saw
natural selection as the mechanism by which varieties emerged and eventually became
distinct species.26 Darwin was first drawn to gradations in Galpagos mockingbirds,
while in fact the thirteen species of wonderfully varied though uniformly brown-to-
black Galpagos finches initially struck him as so distinct in their forms, habitats,
and diet that he failed to recognize them as related and accordingly did not see the
need to carefully label his early collected specimens as to the island of origin.
25 Nora Barlow (ed.), Darwins Ornithological Notes, Bulletin of the British Museum
(Natural History). Historical Series II (1963), 262.
26 Frank J. Sulloway, The Beagle Collections of Darwins Finches (Geospizinae),
Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History (Zoology), XLIII (1982), 4994; Darwin
and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend, Journal of the History of Biology, XV (1982),
153; Darwins Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath, Journal of the History
of Biology XV (1982), 32596.
61

The members of the group we now call Darwins finches, which descended from
a common ancestral stock and gradually diverged to fill various ecological niches on
the Galpagos archipelago in the absence of competition from other species, do not
on the basis of mere observation seem closely related. Their beaks differ greatly in
size, shape, and use. Some of the finches in fact look like finches; but others are more
like warblers, wrens, or blackbirds. Their behaviors and diets vary widely. Some
live on the familiar finch diet of seeds. Others feed on the flowers, nectar, seeds, and
pollen of cacti. Vampire finches subsist on booby blood and eggs; tool-using finches
pry grubs from decaying wood with stems or cactus spines; tick-eating finches pick
their nourishment off the backs of iguanas; bark-peeling finches strip twigs and eat
their tender interior parts. An apt motto for the thirteen diverse yet related Galpagos
finches might invert the Latin tag the American founding fathers devised in 1776 for
the thirteen separate colonies that had just unitedex uno plura, from one thing,
manybut even if Darwin had indulged in classical witticisms, he couldnt have
begun to envision such a genealogical possibility until after he had turned his bird
specimens over to the London ornithologist John Gould for classification. Gould was
excited to find so many hitherto undescribed bird specimens that were apparently
unique to the Galpagosparticularly the diversely beaked brown-to-black birds
that he found to be a group of finches. Aware at last of what hed collected thanks to
Goulds work of classifying, Darwin drew on the wisdom of hindsight to offer some
tentative hypotheses on the finches variation and speciation in The Voyage of the
Beagle. But, cautious as usual, he cut off speculation before it carried him too far
past what empirical evidence had shown:
I have stated, that in the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may
be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to
that of a warbler. I very much suspect, that certain members of the series are confined to
different islands; therefore, if the collection had been made on any one island, it would
not have presented so perfect a gradation. It is clear, that if several islands have each their
peculiar species of the same genera, when these are placed together, they will have a wide
range of character. But there is not space in this work, to enter on this curious subject.
(JR 372)
Darwin eventually came to understand that the Galpagos finches he had collected
were the product of evolution through natural selection. In the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries, the husband and wife research team of Peter and Rosemary Grant,
Princeton-based evolutionary biologists, have annually watched the process of
evolution at work in an ideally knowable community of Galpagos finches. The
Grants still-ongoing project, now regarded as a classic study of evolutionary biology
and compellingly chronicled in their own scholarly publications and in Jonathan
Weiners The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, has for more
than thirty years involved monitoring successive generations of finches on the small
island of Daphne Major.27 Like James Hutton, the Grants understood the importance
27 Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (New York:
Knopf, 1994). The Grants own accounts of their research appear in Ecology and Evolution of
Darwins Finches (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Evolutionary Dynamics
62

of finding a sample of the right scale for empirical observation, neither too large
nor too smalland like him they chose their island well. Though centrally located
in the Galpagos archipelago, Daphne Major has never been settled, or even much
visited, by humans. Its a steep-cliffed stone in the sea, accessible from one sole
landing spot, and only at low tide. With no beach, no harbor, no offshore anchorage
possible in the deep Pacific waters, the rock called Daphne Major offers only one
spot level enough for a campsite. It is springless, so drinking water and all other
provisions must be hauled up a precipitous trail by the Grants and their research
team. Its totally unshaded, often hot, slick with the guano of blue-footed boobies,
and treacherous to circumambulate. But inhospitable though Daphne Major may be
to humans, it sustains a population of finches that during the Grants years of study
has varied between a low of 300 and a high of more than a thousand.
The Grants intimately know each individual finch in this isolated finch
community: they annually trap and band all but the wariest specimens, measure,
weigh, and photograph the birds, and sample their blood for genetic analysis back
at Princeton. Having served as the scientific census-takers for generations of finches
in this environment almost impenetrably isolated from outside influences, the
Grants have been able to watch Darwins finches live out evolutionary principles
that he was able only to theorize. Their observations on Daphne Major show that
in the short term the branched, linear model of divergence that Darwin conceived
of as resembling a treeor, yet more aptly, coral because the living members are
found at the top, above extinct predecessors that were intermediate between living
typesis messy, more reticulated than branched, with the evolutionary directions
varying lineages take proving to be tentative and twisty. Different lineages of the
Daphne Major finches do diverge, but they also interbreed and blend. The Grants
scrupulously patient annual observation of particulars in their perfectly framed study
shows that fission and fusion, competition and communion make the shaping of
varieties and species subtler and less straightforward than Darwin, who had only
the time of the Beagles short stay to observe and collect in the Galpagos and then
was obliged to draw what conclusions he could from what data he had, could hardly
have imagined.
The great gap between foresight and hindsight, the pressing but nearly impossible
goal of somehow collecting all relevant details before one knows the significance of
what ones gathering, and the difficulty in recognizing from a quick survey of surface
features that apparently unrelated organisms are in fact closely related pose difficult
enough problems for the empirical naturalist. But theres also the need to rely heavily
on conjecture in deciding whether a sample, such as Huttons Arran or the Grants
Daphne Major, is likely to be just large enough but not too large, just small enough
but not too smallor in predicting how extensive the 3 or 4 families in a country
village might turn out to be. Determining whether immersion in concrete particulars
will bog down or lead to general principles is likewise a matter of serendipitous
guesswork. Case in point: Charles Darwins meeting with a microscopic shell-less
barnacle he whimsically called Mr Arthrobalanus. When in January 1835 Darwin
of a Natural Population: The Large Cactus Finch of the Galpagos (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1989), and many other publications.
63

walked along a Chilean beach where he found conch shells curiously riddled with
tiny holes, he cant have suspected that his encounter with the parasitic marine animal
responsible for those holes would lead to a project of epic proportions, one that
would occupy nine years of his life (184654) and result in four hefty monographs
together offering an exhaustive and definitive taxonomy of the subclass cirripedia,
orders lepadidae, balanidae, and verrucidaein other words barnacles, living and
fossil, pedunculated and sessile.28 This grand exercise in collecting, anatomizing,
and classifying so filled Charles Darwins days and dominated his domestic
routine that a Darwin child was said to have asked concerning a neighbors father,
Then where does he do his barnacles?29 Darwins barnacle work was of course a
consummately empirical enterprise, but it also intimately and crucially influenced
his much more speculative and potentially controversial project on varieties and
speciesa preliminary 231-page draft of which had been finished in February 1844,
set aside in a drawer with clear instructions charging his wife Emma to have the
work published in the event of his death, and resurrected in September 1854, around
the time the fourth and final barnacle volume was published. Its possible to view the
vast yet minute barnacle project in a number of ways. As an obsession with minutiae,
it undeniably distracted Darwin from his speculative work on how varieties and
species arise. Yet it also enriched that greater project in a number of ways. Even the
act of delay even turned out to be felicitous.
Darwin began what would come to be his nine-years exile in the marine realm of
barnacles as he was finishing the decade-long classification of his Beagle specimens
and only one species remained to be placed, the anomalous barnacle Arthrobalanus
collected years before on the Chilean coast. Darwin dissected the curious organism
with the help of his friend J. D. Hooker, a confidant who knew the secret, tentative
thoughts on natural selection recorded in Darwins then-dormant manuscript. Hooker
assisted with the laborious anatomizing by microscope and put Darwin in touch
with an optician whose lens greatly improved Darwins instrument. Darwin honed
and polished his micro-anatomic techniques even as he deepened his collaborative
and collegial friendship with Hooker, who had but recently returned from his own
naturalist travels. Two weeks spent dissecting Arthrobalanus showed Darwin that
I could spend another month on it, & daily see some more beautiful structure!30
Understanding the particulars of these beautiful structures could come only through
comparison with homologous parts in other species, so Darwin soon began borrowing
28 For much more on Darwin and his work with barnacles, see Rebecca Stotts learned
and elegant monograph Darwin and the Barnacle (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).
29 Francis Darwin reports this incident in an amusing anecdote testifying to Darwins
persistence at his barnacle labors in the two-volume More Letters of Charles Darwin he
co-edited with A. C. Seward (New York: Appleton and Co., 1903), I, 38: This research would
have fully occupied a less methodical workman, and even to those who saw him at work it
seemed his whole occupation. Thus (to quote a story of Lord Aveburys) one of Mr Darwins
children is said to have asked, in regard to a neighbour, Then where does he do his barnacles?
as though not merely his father, but all other men, must be occupied on that group.
30 Quoted in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York: Warner Books,
1991), p. 340.
64

barnacle specimens: different species and varieties at different stages of the barnacle
life cycle. As was his way, an interest in one small thing widened.
In striving to understand the mysteries of Arthrobalanus, outrageously atypical
yet undeniably a barnacle, Darwin had serendipitously begun to cultivate a fertile
field of inquiry. As recently as 1830, barnacles had been classified in the wrong
phylum. Barnacles had been considered members of phylum Mollusca rather than
Arthropoda, until John Thompsons study of free-swimming barnacle larvae had
shown that they were not mollusks but crustaceansthat though generally housed
in shells and anchored throughout their adult lives to rocks, reefs, or ships, they
were related to shrimp and lobsters, not mussels and limpets. In the 1830s, 40s,
and 50s, when naturalists were at work examining and classifying various groups
of marine creatures (Robert Grant studying sponges, Edward Forbes starfish and
medusae, T. H. Huxley jellyfish, squid, sea squirts, and crawfish), barnacles remained
comparatively neglected. Darwin felt the need to win his taxonomic spurs by coming
to know everything about the entire barnacle community. Already skeptical of his
grandfather Erasmuss evolutionary speculations for being too thinly supported
by concrete observations, Darwin had been stung when Hooker, speaking of yet
another naturalist who theorized about species, Frdric Grard, had dismissively
stated that no one had earned the right to examine the question of species who has
not minutely described many.31 Hooker had not meant to imply an application of
these dogmatic words to Darwins case, though in fact he did think Darwin too
prone to theoretical considerations about speciesand Darwin may have taken
Hookers criticism of Grard personally in part because it echoed his already existing
doubts of his qualification to publish on so speculative a matter and his fears that
he had amassed too little specific evidence to buttress his evolutionary ideas. In any
event, Darwin recognized that a thorough examination of all varieties of barnacles
would gain him the empirical gravitas needed to anchor his evolutionary ideas.
The deeper he went into what he meant to be the definitive taxonomic treatment of
barnacles, the more problems of classification proliferated. The field expanded to
include fossil barnacles as well as living varieties. But as Darwin dissected extant
species and deconstructed fossils, roaming much as his grandfather Erasmus had
done terrestrially and botanically in Loves of the Plants through a marine array of
polymorphic sexuality (hermaphroditic, unisexual, bisexual, and various transitional
forms, including the bizarre Ibla genus with relatively giant-sized females and tiny
supplemental males that were no more than mere bags of spermatozoa), he
found more and more evidence bolstering his notebook thoughts on evolution.
The painstaking, microscopic work of dissection and classification and the
no-less-intricate task of gathering a comprehensive array of all the known living and
extinct barnacles from fellow collectors at home and abroad may have consumed
Darwins energies and filled years of his life, but the apparent digression ended up
putting him farther along the path towards publishing his evolutionary thoughts.
During the barnacle years, Darwin had honed and polished his empirical skills in
the laboratoryat a time of life when periods of bad health and the responsibilities
associated with being patriarch of an ever-increasing family, landowning squire of
31 Quoted in ibid., p. 341.
65

a country neighborhood, and capitalist manager of a substantial, growing fortune
combined to preclude naturalist fieldwork of the sort that had occupied him during the
Beagle voyage. He had built a solid reputation as a systematic zoologist and thereby
gained authority that, as Hooker had pointed out, would add credibility to his more
speculative work. Hed recruited a worldwide team of collegial correspondents and a
method for enlarging itthereby gaining a lifelong way of reaching out from Down
House to far-flung allies on whom he might rely for data, observations, insights, and
support in the political and ideological debates his evolutionary ideas would spark
within the rising profession of science and beyond. And, although he cannot have
intended it, the nine-years digression allowed Darwin to put away and then return
to his evolving evolutionary manuscript at the right moments in his career and in the
progress of scientific thought.
Remarkably for a book that might seem, at retrospective first glance, so perfectly
timedwritten when its author was ready to articulate its ideas and published when
his audience was ready to consider themDarwins Origin of Species was both
deferred and precipitated by other evolutionary texts, whose respective advents
neatly bracket Darwins barnacle years. In 1844 the reading public was buzzing, and
mostly outraged, thanks to a glib, anonymous book called Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creationthe intellectual journalist Robert Chamberss speculation-
heavy, evidence-light account of how life on earth gradually evolved into ever more
complex forms over long periods of time. The notoriety Vestiges attracted for its
heretical and ungrounded speculations was enough to drive Darwin, who had at
first feared that his ideas might be pre-empted by Vestiges but instead found himself
warned by its hostile reception, to bury his own transformationist musings in a desk
drawerand himself in the barnacle project. Later, the 1858 receipt of Alfred Russel
Wallaces manuscript sketching out a model for how species originated so closely
resembling Darwins own that, as he wrote to Lyell on June 18, if Wallace had
my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!
Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters (CCD VII, 107). The arrival
of Wallaces manuscript made Darwin put aside the big book on evolution he had
begun to craft from his 1842 manuscript and other notes in 1856, with the barnacles
behind him. Pressed by the need to get his ideas in circulation quickly, he dropped
the exhaustively documented empirical study that would have taken many more
years to complete and produced the stripped-down argument that, as Origin, would
shake the world in 1859.
Like Darwins lifelong series of projects, in one way or another all of Austens
novels concern themselves with the problem of understanding larger things through
observing smaller ones and with correcting perspectives or revising hypotheses
in light of carefully observed and fairly judged evidence. The three novels with
abstract qualities in their titles present the epistemological issues that name them
more or less straightforwardly. Sense and Sensibility overtly serves up a series of
events demonstrating the rewards and limitations of its titles two qualities of mind
as represented by two heroines, Elinor and Marianne. Pride and Prejudice leaves the
apportionment of qualities more debatable. Is it Darcy whos proud and Elizabeth
whos prejudiced? Or does each of them manifest a bit of each failing? If so, in what
relative proportions? But here too the march of events, the discovery of new facts,
66

and the fair-minded appraisal of unexpected behaviors combine to offer healthy
correctives to the somewhat distorted perspectives through which two skilled and
intelligent, but not perfect, observers view things. Persuasion also centers on right
and wrong readings of evidenceand it offers its percipient protagonist Anne Elliot
a longer span for mental readjustment, seeing that she and Frederick Wentworth, the
romantic principals of the main story, are also those of the backstory but now eight
years older and more experienced.
The two novels with place titles, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, work in
bildungsroman fashion. In these two books, we see young, mentally malleable girls
transplanted, if at very different ages and stages of development, to new places. The
key place in each case is the estate named in the title (though Bath serves as a way
station at which Catherine Morlands initiation into adult ways of thinking begins),
where the heroine learns to observe, think, and judgepartly through broadened
experience and partly through the tutelage of the benevolent and perceptive older male
who befriends and will eventually marry her. Its not only the principal characters
who read and interpret the signs and specifics of Austenworld and are judgedby
Austen, her narrator, and her readers alikeas judges of evidence. Particularly in
the three novels begun after the move to Chawton, Austen depicts communities
where nearly every consciousness, from the finest down to the coarsest, reveals itself
dramatically through perceiving, reporting, and trying to make sense of details.
Nowhere else in Austenworld is the collection and interpretation of data as intense
and widespread a preoccupation as in Emma, Austens densest and most narrowly
delimited novel. Many main or secondary characters manage to move beyond the
direct surveillance of their fellow citizens in Highbury, the large and populous
village almost amounting to a town32 to which Emmas house Hartfield actually
belongs in spite of its country-house features. But the comings and goings of the
mobile characters and other reported or imagined happenings beyond the horizon
at the Churchills Enscombe, Mr Sucklings Maple Grove, the resorts of Weymouth
and Bath, the John Knightleys house in Brunswick Square, or the Dixons Irish
estate are also grist for the interpretative mills operated by those Highbury citizens
stuck like barnacles on the spot. Among those stay-at-homes is the title character
Emma Woodhouse, unique among Austen heroines in being rooted in her country
neighborhood. Emma is the Austen heroine whose powers of observation and
interpretation are presented and appraised in fullest detail. Yet she never spends a
night away from home and only once travels more than a good country walk from
her fathers roof. Then she only visits nearby Box Hill, an easy days outing from
Highbury. Emma the observera woman whose lively mind is suited to make her
a naturalist, novelist, empiricist, serendipitist, or imaginistis confined by default
to focusing, as Austen recommended in the letter to her niece Anna, on three or four
families in a country village. Nonetheless, due to some of Emmas limitations, the
Highbury community is less knowable than she believes.
32 Jane Austen, Emma, ed. R. W. Chapman (London and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1933, repr. 1971), 7. Subsequent citations will refer to this edition, which will be
abbreviated E, and will appear parenthetically.
67

If Emma had been written from a slightly different narrative viewpoint Highbury
might, as Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park do, suitably provide a place-name
title for the novel concerning the people interacting in its milieu. Had the tale been
so titled, Austen might perhaps have told her story more along the lines of George
Eliots Middlemarch, with many Highbury heads and hearts laid open for the
authors, her narrators, and the readers scrutiny. Instead, Austens title character
is generally the narratives central consciousness when the omniscient narrator is
not. Despite making a few ventures into the minds of other characters, especially
George Knightley, Austens narrator habitually chooses Emmas consciousness when
showing a scene from an individuals vantage point. But although were mainly in
the mind of Emma when not keeping company with the narrator, were continuously
aware that all the other inquiring minds of Highbury are busily gathering detail and
evaluating evidence.
The novels first dramatized situation involves Emma, her father, and Mr
Knightley discussing details of the Weston wedding. The concluding chapters final
phrases juxtapose Mrs Eltons verdict on Emmas own wedding (Very little white
satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!Selina would stare when she
heard of it) with the benevolent confidence of the small band of true friends
who accurately predict the perfect happiness of the union (E 484). In between,
nearly everyones gathering data in enlightened or mere empirical fashion and
hypothesizing solutions to the mysteries, great and small, that drive the brilliantly
intricate plot. What is Harriet Smiths parentage? Why wont Jane Fairfax join
the Dixons in Ireland? Who bought her the pianofort? How did the rumor of the
Coles aspiring to set up their carriage get into circulation? Is Mrs Churchill a real
or an imaginary invalid? And then there are the many questions related to romantic
matters. Does Mr Elton love Harriet? Is Mr Knightley attached to Emma? What is
the state of Frank Churchills feelings? From first to last, Emma is a tightly woven
tissue of mysteries for the empirical eye to solve.
While writing the novel, Austen somewhat disingenuously referred to Emma as
a heroine no one but myself will much like.33 A reader who dislikes Emma may
well dislike the novels narrator and Austen herselffor the three share a number
of important qualities of mind and sensibility, as do those sympathetic readers who
successfully negotiate the densely detailed neighborhood of the novel. Highbury, like
Huttons Arran or the Grants Daphne Major, turns out to be perfect as an empiricists
training ground. Its a place on just the right scale for close observation that leads
to something beyond mere detected factand thus it is also a knowable community
ideal for training and exercising the mind of a novelist, naturalist, or serendipitist
or, with less discipline, that of an imaginist like Emma. At almost the exact center
of the novel lies one of the passages most crucial to the readers understanding of
Emmas mind and how its come to be as it is. While Harriet dithers over muslins
at Fords, Emma, for once not inclined to manage her protges choice, instead
chooses to look out of the door:
33 Quoted in James Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 203.
68

Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;Mr
Perry walking hastily by, Mr William Cox letting himself in at the office door, Mr Coles
carriage horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the
liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher
with his tray, a tidy old woman traveling homewards from shop with her full basket, two
curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the bakers
little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and
was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can
do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer. (E 233)
In another novel titled for its heroine, provincial everydayness of this sort drives
another Emma, Flauberts Madame Bovary, to ennui, extravagance, adultery,
depression, and finally suicidefor Madame Bovarys a romantic fantasist. A mature
naturalist, novelist, empiricist, or serendipitist would seize on such a scene of things-
as-they-are, recognizing that it contains phenomena to be seen, understood, and
interpretedand Emma Woodhouse is, much of the time, capable of enjoying the
observation of such prosaic phenomena. But sometimes such a mundane scene must
seem confined and dull to a young woman of twenty years, described in the novels
first sentence as handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy
disposition, shown and said elsewhere to be the picture of health and vigor, implied
to have been queen of all she surveys even before the moment she came out. As
the most affluent of Austens principal heroines and the only one living in a house
thats neither entailed nor tied to a church living, Emma has no active necessity of
marryingbut she likewise has no economic impediments to free and extensive
traveling, to mixing and mingling in the polite society of the metropolis or the
fashionable watering places. Emmas homebound by custom, kindness, and the lack
of a sibling in residence. Shes condemned by her charitable heart and responsible
head to cosseting a valetudinarian stay-at-home father. Even poor, orphaned Jane
Fairfax, destined for the governess trade, has seen more of the world than privileged
Emma has. Thus its no wonder that she can be tempted to remake her microcosm
and at least some of its inhabitants into something more interesting to a young ladys
scrutiny. Whats wondrous is that Emmas vision is as empirically grounded and
sensible as it is.
Emmas milieu as rendered by Austens eagle-eyed narrator is a palpably
material world. We dont merely know peoples comparative standing in the social
hierarchy and, in many cases, the extent of their incomes or independent fortunes.34
More than just a socioeconomic environment, Highbury is an assemblage of minute
temporal and material details. We the readers become intimately familiar with the
34 Though what could be a better case study for the interpreter of nuance than the
impression Mr Eltons given Highbury of his fiance Augusta Hawkinss settlement by
speaking of so many thousands as would always be called ten, and 10,000l. or thereabouts?
Heard by an irony-sensitive ear, these pretentiously vague phrases unintentionally convey
an impression opposite to the one Elton means to transmitand precisely because of his
intentional vagueness. A clear majority of the students and other readers Ive informally
surveyed on the question understand Augusta Hawkinss marriage portion to be somewhat
under 10,000l.
69

smallest particulars of this microcosm that confines and defines Emmawere
obliged to become fellow interpreters of the specific data she and other observers
in the country neighborhood have noticed and appraised. To cite, almost randomly,
a handful of specifics from the profusion: we come to know that Mr Eltons rectory
is an undistinguished old edifice, too near the road but prettied up with new yellow
curtains; that Emma is capable of deliberately breaking a bootlace to create a pretext
for throwing Elton and Harriet together; that Emma deems Jane Fairfax and the Bates
women worth a ten-minutes social call (the precise amount of time Frank Churchill
duplicitously asserts to be all that was necessary, perhaps all that was proper for
visiting the same house) and insures that Harriets visit to the Martin females lasts
only fourteen minutes, which makes it a delicately calibrated blend of courtesy and
slight; that Mrs Batess spectacles need repair; that wax candles will be supplied in
the Smallridges schoolroom, to which Mrs Elton is hell-bent on dispatching Jane
Fairfax; that Mr Perrys diplomatically agreed with his patient Mr Woodhouse about
the dangers of consuming rich wedding-cake but that nonetheless his children are
said to have been seen consuming hefty slices of the Westons nuptial confection;
that the December storm throwing Mr Woodhouse into consternation about being
snowbound at Randalls deposits at most half an inch of snow on the road. We hear
that Hartfield pork is not like other pork, but nonetheless that Mr Woodhouse
fears the unwholesomeness of roasting even the benign Hartfield product; we smile
when he suggests that Emma send a loin of this exquisitely superior meat to the
Bates household only to learn that shes already dispatched an entire leg; and then
laugh when Miss Bates says how good it will be roasted. We learn that Harriet
lightens her purse by a shilling in hopes of shaking off the menacing gypsies, and
that Frank Churchill makes his first Highbury purchase, gloves, at Fords, where
he can choose between Mens Beavers and York Tan. We become aware not
only that Mr Knightley sends a bushel or more of apples by William Larkins to
the Bates household but also that these apples come from a tree (or perhaps two)
long famed for producing fruit that keeps well, that this act of generosity cleans
out Mr Knightleys remaining supply and thereby displeases his housekeeper Mrs
Hodges, whos indignant that he wont have another apple-tart all spring, that Miss
Bates intends the apples to be baked for Jane, and that this treat will be prepared by
Mrs Wallis, who bakes apples twice, not three times as Mr Woodhouse has made
Miss Bates promise to have them done. All this detail and far, far more is available
to the naturalist and novel-reader exploring Highbury in the company of Austens
narrator.
But despite being constructed of minute particulars, Emma is by no means
confined to them. In fact, as suggested earlier, the attitude towards what one might
call mere empiricism reflected in this noveland in all Austens othersis
essentially negative. At first one might think that Austen, her narrator, or both are
a bit unfair or doubleminded: willing to represent the smallest details yet equally
willing to mock or implicitly condemn characters who take a demonstrable interest
in concrete particulars. But in Emma it becomes obvious, once one considers the
matter, that the superior minds of Highbury, like the inferior ones, pay attention
to details. Emmas directions to servants as lady of the house (particularly when
she needs to take active measures to forestall the stinting of guests that her fathers
70

valetudinarianism would inflict) and her compassionate kindness to the sick and
impoverished cottagers (visited just before the encounter with Elton that makes her
strategically break her bootlace) necessarily involve attention toand articulation
ofdetail. Mr Knightley, a keen and active man of property who takes hands-on
interest in specific agricultural matters rather than leaving them to his steward
William Larkins or his tenant Robert Martin, is understood to be immersed in the
details of running a country estate; but we dont hear him speak on such matters.
When John Knightley is visiting from London, the brothers shared fascination with
the practical particulars of running Donwell are clearly reported, but not dramatically
presented:
The brothers talked of their own concerns and pursuits, but principally of those of the
elder, whose temper was by much the most communicative, and who was always the
greater talker. As a magistrate, he had generally some point of law to consult John about,
or, at least, some curious anecdote to give; and as a farmer, as keeping in hand the home-
farm at Donwell, he had to tell what every field was to bear next year, and to give all such
local information as could not fail of being interesting to a brother whose home it had
equally been the longest part of his life, and whose attachments were strong. The plan of
a drain, the change of a fence, the felling of a tree, and the destination of every acre for
wheat, turnips, or spring corn, was entered into with as much equality of interest by John,
as his cooler manners rendered possible; and if his willing brother ever left him any thing
to enquire about, his inquiries even approached a tone of eagerness. (E 100)
The impression implied and derived here is positiveof landed gentry actively and
responsibly engaged in the daily running of an estate. George Knightleys attention
to managing Donwell aligns him with Fitzwilliam Darcy, in contrast to such
feckless, frivolous, absent, or detached Austen estate-owners as Willoughby, Sir
Walter Elliot, Henry Crawford, and even Mr Bennet, whose reported involvement
with Longbourn centers on his twin fields of indulgence, the library where he reads
and the woods where he shoots. But, very significantly, Knightleys concern for his
estate is reported at second hand, not singled out for word-by-word dramatization.
This shrewd narratological choice is one thing that keeps him, unlike another
scrupulously responsible abbey-owner, General Tilney of Northanger, whos shown
discussing his estate, from seeming like a proser or a show-off. (The other markers
of difference from Knightley are that Tilneys laying out of specifics centers on
improvements that add to his personal comfort and prestige and that his detail-laden
speech directs itself not at an informed, interested equal but at a nave girl he aims
to impress.) Its hard to imagine that a word-by-word account of the Knightley
brothers discourse on drains and gates, wheat, turnips, and corn could be anything
but dullness, incongruity, or fodder for irony in a novel of the sort Austen writes:
serious attention to technical minutiae would be more the province of George Eliots
realism. But even if Austen could record a conversation bogged down in agricultural
specificity without mocking it, she wouldnt. One of her most consistent rhetorical
strategies, in Emma and elsewhere, is to forge a link between reported remarks on
trivial topics or material things (reports not consciously ironized by those uttering
them, that is) and trivial-mindedness or materialism. Throughout Austenworld,
serious-minded heroines need to make choices about dress and adornment, but
71

theyre never shown taking true interest in these petty matterswith the possible
exception of Fanny Price, who worries over a chain to carry the amber cross given
by her brother William, and Fannys problem is a matter of economics, sentiment,
and etiquette, not mere fashion. Its a truth that should be universally acknowledged:
those directly shown speaking seriously and publicly about minute particulars in
Austenworld set themselves up to be ridiculed by Austens narrator.
This precept is never truer than at Highbury. Densely particularized though the
populous village may be, those characters whose minds are confined to material
phenomena and whose speech bogs down in detail are singled out for mockery,
disapproval, or bothwhether explicitly by Emma or implicitly by the narrator.
But in nearly every case, Austen has clearly discernible subsidiary purposes for
characters long-winded, over-particularized speeches so that she never runs the risk
of arraignment for charges like those Robert Southey leveled at his friend and fellow
Lake District resident Wordsworth for creating the tedious sea-captain who narrates
The Thorn: he who personates tiresome loquacity becomes tiresome himself.35
Such personations are instructive rather than (or as well as) tedious in Emma.
Mr Woodhouses tiresome loquacitymanifested in rambling endorsements of
gruel and prescriptions of how it should be cooked, verbosely voiced anxieties about
health, safety, change, or sudden decisions, and convoluted old-school courtesies
reveals the timid, feeble, prematurely senile nature of his mind. But because readers
are obliged to suffer through Mr Woodhouses tedious prosings, they are far likelier
to understand and value Emmas and Knightleys benevolent patience in bearing
with him than would be the case if his fears and whims were merely reported, not set
down in his own words.
Similarly, reporting Mrs Eltons relentless flow of particularity, the narrator
allows her choir of vicesselfishness, insincerity, irrationality, greed, stupidity, and
snobberyto sing for themselves. Theres no need for the narrator to inform the reader
that this confident newcomer who vaunts her simplicity and then speaks of trimming
her silver poplin dress with lace, who rhapsodizes about her passion for music and
then voices the commonplace about married women giving up their instruments, who
drones on about Maple Groves substantial grounds and the Sucklings barouche-
landau, and who tries to micromanage the details of Mr Knightleys strawberry-
picking party at Donwell is a hypocritical, vulgar, presumptuous bore. Seeing (and
even more, hearing) Mrs Elton in full flow, the readers disposed to like Emma more
than might otherwise be the case; for Emmas worst qualities are exaggerated tenfold
in Mrs Elton, and her best attributes are totally lacking. The narrators exquisite
manipulation of direct quotation and indirect report adds a further strategy for
portraying Augusta Hawkins Elton in her horrid glory. Judiciously blending what
we assume to be Mrs Eltons exact words with indirect discourse, the narrator at
once exposes us to tiresome loquacity per se and implies that theres far more of it
than we actually hear, a mass of material too voluminous and tedious to transcribe.
Austen resorts to this mixed blend of quoted speech and reportage to characterize
35 Southeys remark, originally appearing in the Critical Review, XXIV, 200, is quoted
in Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads (1798) (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976), 247.
72

Mrs Eltons first appearance: the sharply materialist appraisal of Hartfield and
relentlessly forced comparison of its charms to Maple Groves strikes the Eltonian
note on first utterance, and the selective transcription implies that what the visiting
brides been saying is even worse than we can know. Later, Mrs Eltons riff on
strawberries is not given totally verbatim but selectively and topically, in much the
same way that Hansard published the parliamentary reports of Austens day or that
a gardeners handbook would outline topics at the head of a chapter. This method of
narration simultaneously confirms our sense of the speaker being stuck in material
particulars, implies that shes worked up her horticultural expertise for the occasion,
suggests that the exact words are so insincere or tiresome that we need not have them
quoted in full, and accurately renders the mood swing from delight to disgust as Mrs
Elton, encumbered by her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket,
grows ever more tired (as Mr Knightley knew she would) of the rustic delights of
picking strawberries:
The best fruit in Englandevery bodys favouritealways wholesome.These the

finest beds and finest sorts.Delightful to gather for ones selfthe only way of really
enjoying them.Morning decidedly the best timenever tiredevery sort good
hautboy infinitely superiorno comparisonthe others hardly eatablehautboys
very scarceChili preferredwhite wood finest flavour of allprice of strawberries
in Londonabundance about BristolMaple Grovecultivationbeds when to be
renewedgardeners thinking exactly differentno general rulegardeners never to
be put out of their waydelicious fruitonly too rich to be eaten much ofinferior
to cherriescurrants more refreshingonly objection to gathering strawberries the
stoopingglaring suntired to deathcould bear it no longermust go and sit in the
shade. (E 3589)
Through this form of free indirect discourse the narrator economically but exactly
renders half an hour in Mrs Eltons company, thankfully sparing us all her exact
words, which would perhaps have sprawled to something like the length of Molly
Blooms much more interesting stream-of-consciousness conclusion to Ulysses.
Apart from Mr Woodhouse and Mrs Elton, the other two citizens of Highbury
most persistently mired in mundane particulars are Harriet Smith and Miss Bates;
but empirical readers and Highburyians alike ignore the tiresome loquacity of
these women at their peril. Both resemble Mr Woodhouse in being well-meaning
but not particularly judicious or discerning. They resemble one another in being
people the world can marginalize. Unlike Mr Woodhouse, whose birth, income, sex,
and age entitle him to respect his mental powers could never earn, Miss Smith and
Miss Bates can easily be written off. Harriet is the natural daughter of someone,
which is to say no one known to Highbury. A parlor boarder at Miss Goddards
far-from-fashionable school, she has only beauty, youth, and good nature going for
her, until these qualitiesand the mystery of her parentageattract the attention
of Emma, whose sponsorship gives her some reflected social cachet. Miss Batess
situation is as precarious as Harriets or more so. Though a gentlemans daughter,
she holds none of the other advantages that confer status on a woman: as the narrator
waspishly pronounces, Miss Bates enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity
for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married (E 21)the adjectival
73

sequence echoing the initial description of Emma while denying Miss Bates the
crucial attributes guaranteeing popularity to Emma, married or not. Throughout the
novel, the narrator characteristically reports both Harriets and Miss Batess exact
words, however banal; for one reason these characters exist in the novel is to sound
naively shallow in one case, tediously long-winded in the other. Its all too easy for
a reader to do as the citizens of Highbury (especially Emma) might and write off
Harriets observations or tune out Miss Batess many-more-than-three-things-very-
dull-indeed.
But failing to pay attention to what Harriet and Miss Bates have to say is a
mistake on at least two grounds. Condescending to the one and ignoring the other, a
negligent reader commits the very sins she or he may, in superior fashion, be charging
to Emma.36 The second drawback of marginalizing the words of these unmarried
women is more substantial. Harriet Smith and Miss Bates will never win prizes for
their cerebral skills, but theyre much better observers than they get credit for being.
Miss Batess remarks may never transcend daily particulars, and Harriets conclusion-
drawing may be nave at best; but both women are surprisingly fair-minded and
clear-sighted observers of things as they are. A reader who ignores what they see and
sayespecially details buried in Miss Batess effusionsmisses clues necessary to
solving the many mysteries that preoccupy their country neighborhood.
The narrator presents Miss Bates in full-flow stream-of-consciousness several
times in the course of Emma. The style and structure of these palpably material,
unfailingly appreciative, absurdly specific performances emerges clearly in
miniature mimicry as Emma, debating with Mrs Weston about whether or not Mr
Knightley might aim at marrying Jane Fairfax, imagines the chatterbox aunt as a sort
of effusively grateful ghost disturbing Donwells peace:
How would he bear to have Miss Bates belonging to him?To have her haunting the
Abbey, and thanking him all day long for his great kindness in marrying Jane? So very
kind and obliging! But he always had been such a very kind neighbour! And then fly
off, through half a sentence, to her mothers old petticoat. Not that it was such a very old
petticoat eitherfor still it would last a great whileand, indeed, she must thankfully say
that their petticoats were all very strong. (E 225)
Miss Batess first actual, rather than imagined, effusion comes in the first chapter
of Volume II, when Emma cannily calls under the assumption that the Bates ladies
wont recently have heard from Jane Fairfax, learns to her chagrin that Jane has
in fact just written, is obliged to hear the whole substance of the letter along with
digressions on Janes penmanship, her economy of paper, and other matters, and
only just escapes before the letter already characterized in fullest detail can be read
aloud to her. Miss Bates next holds forth in Chapter IX of Volume II. This gush of
words is set off by Emmas preliminary I hope Mrs Bates and Miss Fairfax are,
36 Confessional moment: it was not until my third or fourth time through the novel that I,
having on earlier readings impatiently skipped bits of Miss Batess seemingly interminable
monologues and given no credit to Harriets statements, found that Id fallen into a cleverly
set narratological trap. If my readerly manners and morals were no better than Emmas
interpersonal ones, how could I presume to judge her?
74

a commonplace inquiry curtailed by Miss Batess almost four-page medley on Janes
health, Mrs Batess spectacles and Frank Churchills repair of them, the complete
history of their latest batch of baked apples, and the dark, narrow twistiness of
their staircase, up which she conducts Emma and Harriet (E 2369). The virtually
uninterrupted monologue terminates only because Miss Bates and her guests enter
the sitting-room occupied by Jane, Frank, and old Mrs Bates. Still later in the second
chapter of the third volume, on her arrival at the Westons ball, Miss Bates launches
into yet another epic of mundane detail, some of the topics being the rain, her thick-
soled shoes, the festive look of the Crowns ballroom, Janes health and looks,
greetings to the various guests, and renewed compliments on the hospitality, with
the conclusion Everything so good! (E 3223). Miss Batess monologue is almost
directly followed by an equally detailed if briefer discourse from Mrs Elton that,
though comparably tedious, highlights the key difference in the two bores, the one
warmly outgoing, the other coldly self-involved. A few days later on Box Hill, Miss
Bates, with amiable self-mockery, is about to venture the three things very dull
indeed option Frank Churchill has proposed for Emmas amusement along with
its alternatives, one thing very clever, be it prose or verse, original or repeatedor
two things moderately cleverbut Emma cuts her off with Ah! Maam, but there
may be a difficulty. Pardon mebut you will be limited as to numberonly three
at once (E 370). After Emmas callous snub at Box Hill, Miss Batess volubility is
curbed, but only temporarily. When Emma pays her penitential visit the next day, all
it takes is a friendly inquiry after Miss Fairfax to precipitate a long, detailed account
of Janes having accepted a governess position in the neighborhood of Maple Grove,
at the Smallridges (E 37983).
If Miss Bates is hard to bear, its because she talks too much. Harriet Smiths
discourse is discredited for a different reason: she often seems indecisive, ignorant,
or both. There are several reasons why we should be careful of feeling too certain
about Harriets innate limitations, though. First, Harriet is young. At seventeen, shes
a contemporary of Northanger Abbeys heroine Catherine Morland, whose at-home
education seems not much better than Harriets at Miss Goddards schooland
Catherine strikes most readers as youthfully nave, not stupid. Harriet seems as dim
or wrongheaded as she does because we see her chiefly in conversation with Emma,
whose stronger, more sophisticated mind makes Harriets look even weaker and
simpler than it is and whose guidance (as opposed to Henry Tilneys mentorship of
Catherine) misleads Harriet as much as, or more than, it improves her. Harriet Smith
can be easily written off as an airhead; but a close look at her principal speeches
shows that in fact shes a good, close observer of detailand not just physical detail
either, but emotions as well. She may be no judge of a letter, but she can accurately
understand the language of faces, voices, and bodies. In an early utterance, Harriet
shows herself sharp-eyed and retentive of details pertaining to the Abbey-Mill Farm
where she stayed the previous September, right down to the upper-maid who has been
there twenty-five years and the eight cows, two of them Alderneys, and one a little
Welch cow, a very pretty little Welch cow indeed (E 27). She recalls that Robert
Martin has been bid more for his wool than any body in the country and remembers
what books hes read and not read (E 289). She may not be able to gauge the quality
of his written proposal with Emmas acuteness (it is but a short letter too, E 54)
75

or to puzzle out the meaning of Eltons obsequious charade on courtship (Can it
be Neptune? Or a trident? or a mermaid? or a shark?, E 723). But the indirect
discourse relayed through Emmas reacting mind conveys Harriets impressions of
her 14-minute reunion with the Martins in a way that shows her capable of clear,
accurate perceptions when things and feelings are straightforward:
They had received her doubtingly, if not coolly; and nothing beyond the merest common-
place had been talked almost all the timetill just at last, when Mrs Martins saying, all
of a sudden, that she thought Miss Smith was grown, had brought on a more interesting
subject, and a warmer manner. In that very room she had been measured last September,
with her two friends. There were the pencilled marks and memorandums on the wainscot
by the window. He had done it. They all seemed to remember the day, the hour, the party,
the occasionto feel the same consciousness, the same regretsto be ready to return to
the same good understanding; and they were just growing again like themselves, (Harriet,
as Emma must suspect, as ready as the best of them to be cordial and happy,) when the
carriage re-appeared, and all was over. (E 1867)
Silly and sentimental enough to cherish a leftover bit of court-plaster and a leadless
pencil nub as relics of Elton, Harriet (badly underestimated by Emma) is emotionally
perceptive enough to feel more gratitude for Mr Knightleys rescuing her from
partnerlessness at the ball than for Frank Churchills driving away the gypsies, and
wise enough to understand which man is worthier of her respect, admiration, and
love. That Harriet remains as off-the-mark as she does for most of the novel is due
more to Emmas active misleading than to her minds innate errancy. Left to her own
devicesor advised by an Emma who gave full credit to the excellence she couldnt
help discerning in Robert Martins letter of proposal and whose comparative social
placement of both Martin and Harriet derived from empirical observation rather than
romantic imaginationHarriet Smith would have changed her surname to Martin
shortly after Miss Taylor became Mrs Weston rather than weeks before Emma
married Mr Knightley. And how different the story would have been.
Emmas move away from cherishing imaginism to preferring empirically based
reasoning, and her eventual decision to get on with her own life rather than attempt
to manipulate others as proxies for living herself, are rendered as parts of a delicately
detailed and far from straightforward evolutionary process. Emmas mind and spirit
seem mature and confident when we first encounter herand shes perfectly capable
of keen observation and clear appraisal of what she sees. The problem is that Emma,
like most people, has blind spotsbut she doesnt know it, a particularly dangerous
situation for someone who prides herself on her powers of perception. Emmas
bored and lonely without exactly recognizing that she is. Because she doesnt face or
understand her own feelings, she cant take full account of how they might mislead
her. The story has only just started when the first conversation between Emma and
Knightley reveals Emmas rational strengths and limitations. As they discuss the
recent Weston marriage, she claims, I made the match, you know, four years ago
(E 1011). Knightley disagrees and asserts that her idea of making the match
means only your planning it, your saying to yourself one idle day I think it would
be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr Weston were to marry her (E 1213).
As Knightley sees it, Emmas merely made a lucky guess. But it seems to Emma,
76

something of a serendipitist, that a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always
some talent in it and, further, that there is something between the polarities of the
do-nothing and the do-all in managing relationships from the outside: If I had
not promoted Mr Westons visits here, and given many little encouragements, and
smoothed many little matters, it might not have come to any thing after all (E 13).
Knightley again differs, believing that rational adults are best left to handle their own
concerns and that Emmas interference is likelier to have hindered than promoted the
eventual outcome.
This first encounter between the bright but overconfident heroine and her
commonsensical, equally confident lifelong mentor sets the pattern for subsequent
disagreements between Emma and Knightley. They quarrel over Harriet Smiths
refusal of Robert Martins proposal and Emmas role in thwarting a match that in
Knightleys view would have offered much more benefit to Harriet than to Martin.
They disagree on whether Elton needs someone to find a wife for him and whether
Frank Churchill is truly confined to Enscombe at the whims of Mrs Churchill. They
are at odds about whether there might be a secret understanding between Frank
and Jane Fairfax and about what degree of friendship and attention Emma should
properly show Jane, whose accomplishments highlight the limited nature of Emmas
own and whose reserve exasperates her. But in day in, day out matters of practical
conduct, Emma and Knightley are often shown to be in complete agreement.
They are alike in their concern and respect for old Mr Woodhouse and his shaky
equanimity. A few words between them can smoothly settle the matter of departing
from Randalls in a snowstorm, for their basic values are as similar as their shared
taste for spruce-beer. The consistent pattern: Emma, like Knightley, is fundamentally
observant, humane, and rational; but where and when her powers of imagination get
involved, she doesnt see things as they are. Emma likes to play idle games, whereas
Knightley is businesslike. She casts people in roles to act out dramas she stages in
her minds theaterand would like to produce on the boards of real life. Thus for
Emma, Harriet must be of gentle birth. The Churchills must be to blame for Franks
failure to pay a prompt wedding visit to Highbury. Jane must have a secret love
and this undisclosed amoroso must be the plain, married Mr Dixon rather than the
handsome, eligible Frank Churchill, who must instead vainly love Emma. In Emma,
were shown how the imaginists peremptory needs can intermittently blind the sharp
empirical eye of observation. But Emmas powers of observing and reasoning arent
always impaired; and her minds much more interesting (to the reader, the narrator,
Austen herself, and probably Knightley) because its such a blend of strength, talent,
benevolence, arrogance, and self-delusion.
Emmas preference for being an artist who creates rather than an empiricist who
observes emerges full-blown in Chapter VI of Volume I, where we see her in various
roles: as a metaphorical choreographer or dramatist aiming to manipulate peoples
motions and emotions alike, as an actual artist sketching Harriet, and as an actress-
director playing the sketchers role in her staging of a tableau vivant that centers on
Harriets beauty and encourages Elton to admire it, this second act preceded by one
in which she stimulates Harriets appreciation of Eltons charms and eligibility. The
chapter begins with a report of Emmas smugness at managing that first objective,
which she believes to be the start of a promising attachment: Emma could not feel
77

a doubt of having given Harriets fancy a proper direction and raised the gratitude of
her young vanity to a very good purpose, for she found her decidedly more sensible
than before of Mr Eltons being a remarkably handsome man (E 42). Despite
Emmas complacency, this sentence raises a number of red flags. Emma works
on Harriets fancya mental trait even less grounded than imagination isand
cultivates her vanity rather than fostering some virtue. We also notice early evidence
of a volatile phenomenon Emma will try to exploit in crafting her portrait of Harriet,
that handsomeness or beauty arent stable, objectively discerned properties but
shifting impressions that can be enhanced or diminished through artful strokes,
whether words or a pencil are being wielded.
Elton is of Emmas mind in noticing and professing to value the artistic
improvement of people, though Emma misreads his perception as proof of a growing
attachment to Harriet rather than as a fawning compliment to herself. The language
of art, literal and figurative, pervades their calculated conversation: You have
given Miss Smith all that she required, says Elton. Harriet only wanted drawing
out, replies Emma, her words figuratively foreshadowing what Knightley will later
in the chapter diagnose as the literal fault of her sketch of Harriet. Skillful has been
the hand, pronounces Elton, with a sort of sighing animation, which had a vast
deal of the lover (E 423). The analytical scrutiny of Eltons mode of delivery and
cool awareness of its affective excess seems to be Emmas, for the narrator is in her
consciousness at the time. But, as so often proves true in the novel, Emma observes
the phenomenon accurately but is mistaken about its cause: Elton means to praise her,
not Harriet.
Without even starting a new paragraph, the story jumps forward a few days to the
dramatized incident of Harriets sitting for her portrait. Emma deviously sets up the
scene by asking Harriet if her likeness has ever been taken, then, when Harriets out of
the room, leading on Elton with a casual confession of her own penchant for sketching.
Let me entreat you, he cries out, following his entreaty with effusive praise of
Emmas landscapes and flower and figure-pieces displayed at Hartfield and Randalls.
She rightly gauges the undiscerning nature of his complimentYes, good man!
thought Emmabut what has all that got to do with taking likenesses? You know
nothing of drawing. Dont pretend to be in raptures about mine. Keep your raptures
for Harriets face (E 43)but makes a show of yielding to the encouragement shes
actually invoked, then, with Eltons support, easily prevails on Harriet to pose.
Next follows a perusal of Emmas portfolio containing her various attempts at
portraituremany beginnings in diverse genres and media. The narrator gives us
access not just to the portfolio but to Emmas thoughts about it and about her artistic
accomplishments in general, thoughts that blend basic good taste and disillusioned
self-knowledge with vanity in the sphere of public opinion:
She played and sang;and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been
wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would
have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of. She was not much deceived
as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have
others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it
deserved. (E 44)
78

This meta-appraisal of Emmas powers of self-assessment aims not to educate the
heroine, now in full thrall to her delusions of grandeur, but to train the reader in the
empirical skills necessary to see things as they are in the mannered microcosm of
Highbury. The following lines, characterizing Harriets and Eltons undiscriminating
responses to Emmas oeuvre and implicitly juxtaposing their ignorance with the
narrators educated eye and critical brain, remarkably condense a great deal of keen
observation into a few well-chosen words, at once epigrammatic and axiomatic:
There was merit in every drawingin the least finished, perhaps the most; her style was
spirited; but had there been much less, or had there been ten times more, the delight and
admiration of her two companions would have been the same. They were both in extasies.
A likeness pleases every body; and Miss Woodhouses performances must be capital.
(E 445)
Theres much to consider here. What kind of artistry shows itself to best effect in
the subgenre of nonfinito? Probably raw talent without much discipline or technical
skill. What sort of people could be equally pleased by styles with Emmas degree
of spirit or much less or ten times more? Unreasoning observers, as the word
extasies suggests. Is the observation of a likeness universally pleasing? Perhaps
thats a truth worth granting in one sense of the word likeness but not the other: the
human mind does seem to delight in detecting resemblances, but pleasure in viewing
a portrait depends on a number of circumstances. In any case, Miss Woodhouses
performances must be capital is a claim whose inevitability is clear only to
uncritical beings like Harriet and Elton, one thinking Emma flawless out of simple
gratitude (or, more intricately, the beneficiarys pragmatic inclination to idealize the
benefactor), the other meaning for Emma to believe he thinks her flawless to further
his own purposes of ingratiation.
Emmas portfolio of likenesses is limited to faces and figures from the Hartfield
family circle. As docent to her collection of portraits, Emma displays candor and
good taste in pointing out the strengths of each attempt at portraiture and explaining
the psychological contexts of each exercise. What she judges to be her best work, a
picture thats very like its subject, only too handsome and flattering, is a full-length
miniature of John Knightley, nearly finished but put away in a pet when Isabella
offered cold approbation: Yes, it was a little likebut to be sure it did not do
him justice (E 456). Not deceived about her level of expertise but wanting her
skills recognized for at least as good as they are by others, Emma couldnt bear to
think of this sketch apologized over as an unfavourable likeness, to every morning
visitor in Brunswick-square (E 46)and so, paradoxically, her best effort was the
one that made her put away her paper, pencils, paints, and brushes in a huff. If a
likeness pleases everyone, an expressed sense of a portraits unlikeness can displease
the artist and the viewer in equal measures but different modes.
The critical detachment necessary to judge art as art is evident only in the artist
herself as Harriet sits, Emma sketches, and Elton gazes with fatuous admiration that
allows him to discern a likeness almost before it was possible. She could not respect
his eye, but his love and his complaisance were unexceptionable (E 47). Again, the
narrative emphasizes both Emmas ability to see things as they are and her inclination
79

to connect those effects shes discerned with causes shes imagined. When a more
numerous party assembles to see the picture the next day, each viewer responds
in a way that illuminates his or her habitual way of interpreting. The dramatized
scene offers an empirical reader clear evidence of how people think, feel, speak, and
judge at Highburyparticularly how they think about, feel for, speak of, and judge
Emma.
Every body who saw it was pleased, but Mr Elton was in continual raptures, and defended
it through every criticism.
Miss Woodhouse has given her friend the only beauty she wanted,observed
Mrs Weston to himnot in the least suspecting that she was addressing a lover.The
expression of the eye is most correct, but Miss Smith has not those eye-brows and eye-
lashes. It is the fault of her face that she has them not.
Do you think so? replied he. I cannot agree with you. It appears to me a most
perfect resemblance in every feature. I never saw such a likeness in my life. We must
allow for the effect of shade, you know.
You have made her too tall, Emma, said Mr Knightley.
Emma knew that she had, but would not own it, and Mr Elton warmly added,
Oh, no! certainly not too tall; not in the least too tall. Consider, she is sitting
downwhich naturally presents a differentwhich in short gives exactly the ideaand
the proportions must be preserved, you know. Proportions, fore-shortening.Oh, no! it
gives one exactly the idea of such a height as Miss Smiths. Exactly so indeed!
It is very pretty, said Mr Woodhouse. So prettily done! Just as your drawings
always are, my dear. I do not know any body who draws so well as you do. The only thing
I do not thoroughly like is, that she seems to be sitting out of doors, with only a little shawl
over her shouldersand it makes one think she must catch cold.
But, my dear papa, it is supposed to be summer; a warm day in summer. Look at
the tree.
But it is never safe to sit out of doors, my dear.
You, sir, may say any thing, cried Mr Elton; but I must confess that I regard it
as a most happy thought, the placing of Miss Smith out of doors; and the tree is touched
with such inimitable spirit! Any other situation would have been much less in character.
The naivet of Miss Smiths mannersand altogetherOh, it is most admirable! I cannot
keep my eyes from it. I never saw such a likeness. (E 478)
In this series of responses to the likeness, we detect Mrs Westons discerning eye and
kind heart in her willingness to exaggerate Emmas skill and, having noted Emmas
enhancement of Harriets beauty, to see it in the most benevolent possible light.
Mr Knightleys economically penetrating way of getting to the heart of things is
equally evident in his blunt You have made her too tall, Emmaas are Emmas
characteristic recognition that hes right and concomitant unwillingness to admit it.
Mr Woodhouses response voices his dithering, detail-obsessed valetudinarianism
and his childlike inability to distinguish between life and art. Eltons obsequious,
pretentious, half-educated personal style is perfectly captured in his jumbled
jargon and fragmentary (probably because his ideas are logically uncompletable)
grammatical constructions. In a community so carefully delineated, there is ample
evidence allowing empirical readers to know local facts and understand larger truths
of human nature, so long as we look, attend, think, hypothesize, doubt, and revise
80

a process Emma fails to follow once the portraits done and Elton, who volunteers to
take it to London for framing, accepts his charge with a tender sigh and a canting
phrase, What a precious deposit!
This man is almost too gallant to be in love, thought Emma. I should say so, but that
I suppose there may be a hundred different ways of being in love. He is an excellent
young man, and will suit Harriet exactly but he does sigh and languish, and study for
compliments rather more than I could endure as a principal. (E 49)
The portrait-sketching episode, like the earlier incident of Emma reading and
judging Robert Martins epistolary offer of marriage, presents one of many potential
forks in the narratives path. As was true in the earlier scene, what a different turn
the story would here have taken if Emma had thought critically about the specific
details shed noticed so accurately and not been blinded by premature commitment
to an ill-formulated hypothesis. Austen, however, has determined that the empirical
education of Emma Woodhouse is to proceed much more gradually: no epiphanies
until Volume III, when she learns in rapid succession that shes badly erred in her
behavior to Miss Bates, missed the clues that point towards an engagement between
Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, failed to understand that the object of Harriets
confided romantic attachment has been Mr Knightley rather than Frank Churchill,
and most crucially been ignorant of her own heart. Austen resorts to one of her rare
instances of pulling out the suspense-building stops (such as rhetorical questions,
figurative language, and syntactic structures that reserve the point for the end of a
phrase, sentence, or paragraph) for the scene of Emmas moment of self-knowledge,
which comes hard on the heels of Harriets avowal that she cares for Knightley and
that he, perhaps, may return her affection:
Emmas eyes were instantly withdrawn; and she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude,
for a few minutes. A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own
heart. A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched
she admittedshe acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet
should be in love with Mr Knightley, than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so
dreadfully increased by Harriets having some hope of a return? It darted through her, with
the speed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself! (E 4078)
Self-knowledge and an appreciation for unbiased empiricism as opposed to wishful

imaginism comes late in the novel for Emma Woodhouse; but even if she fails to learn
the epistemological lesson of Volume Is portrait-drawing scene and many others
like it, a reader can. That early chapters sharp focus on individual behavior and
communal interaction epitomizes how subsequent events will proceed in Emmas
Highbury circle, how theyll be rendered by the narrator, and how the agents and
observers alike will evaluate them. If attentive, trained readers draw the conclusions
Emma willfully fails to draw throughout Austens densely detailed presentation of
a few families in an evolving country neighborhood, they can savor ironies that
everywhere elude the intellectually over-confident protagonist. And if they fail to
read evidence correctly until well into the novel, fresh pleasures and perceptions will
await them when they examine the evidence afresh on re-reading.
81

In various ways, the relations of small to large and the sense of how these matters
of scale build communities knowable to empiricists and serendipitists, naturalists
and novelists, have been central themes in my assessment of Darwins and Austens
minds, characters, and writings. That a certain sort of novelists eye can see the world
in a grain of sand is proved when Austen shows how Emmas Ah! maam only
three at once can shake the foundations of communal civility as the temporarily
uprooted representatives of three or four families sit like leisurely, more decorously
clad Olympian gods on Box Hill with Dorking, Mickleham, and other villages in
Surreys garden of England spread below them. A similar kind of naturalists eye
is at work in Darwins serendipitous encounter with Arthrobalanus, as what for most
beachcombers would be the idle act of picking up a shell led to Herculean labors
of collection, examination, interpretation, and classification, the taxonomic odyssey
that grounded and fortified Darwin for his world-changing argument in Origin of
Species. Austens voice began this essay, so let Darwins conclude it, with words
describing his lifes great project to his cousin, friend, and fellow naturalist William
Darwin Fox. Resembling Austen in his sense and sensibility alike, Darwin here
envisions the potential link between trivial phenomena and vast consequencesas
with a mixture of humility and ambition he dedicates himself to following serendipity
and the empirical eye where they will take him:
I forget whether I ever told you what the objects of my present work is,it is to view
all facts that I can master (eheu, eheu, how ignorant I find I am) in Nat. History, (as
on geograph. distribution, palaeontology, classification Hybridism, domestic animals &
plants &c &c &c) to see how far they favour or are opposed to the notion that wild species
are mutable or immutable: I mean with my uttermost power to give all arguments & facts
on both sides. I have a number of people helping me in every way, & giving me most
valuable assistance; but I often doubt whether the subject will not quite overpower me.37
37 CD to W. D. Fox, Feb. 21, 1855, CCD V, 294.
82

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Jane AustenEnvironment and Nature

The Potential of Death by Landscape 20

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Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.

William Hogarths The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) figures prominently in

Jane Austen and Animals

The Animal Question and Women

Jane Austen and Animals

The Animal Question and Women

Man, who is every-where a tyrant or a slave, delights to inflict on each sensible

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Thomas Young, in An Essay on Humanity to Animals (1798), writes that cruelty to

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Similarly, in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, liberty from social prejudice

Emile has everything needed to succeed at it. He is robust, adroit, patient,

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in the liberal, republican ideology of the eighteenth century between property-

Enlightenment feminists interrogated this inscription of sexual difference and

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consider[ing] females rather as women than human creatures (5:73), such as

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The treatment of animals is thus an integral part of Macaulays argument about

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Macaulays benevolence is put to political work; she develops what Sylvia

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Jane Austen and Animals

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In every perception of nature there is actually present the whole of society.

Margaret Atwoods short story, Death by Landscape (1991), depicts a

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in them or even animals, its as if there is something, or someone, looking back

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The Potential of Death by Landscape

shockingly unfeminine area of violenceone which later heroines (such as Lois)

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

The Potential of Death by Landscape

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

The Potential of Death by Landscape

contemplation of landscape. In The Experience of Landscape, Appleton proposes a

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

Figure 2.1 Thomas Gainsborough, Cottage Door. Courtesy of Huntington

The Potential of Death by Landscape

biological needs. However, our involvement with symbolic landscape helps us

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

mothers bracelet containing Emilys miniature has been stolen. Finally a

The Potential of Death by Landscape

Italian landscape painters of the seventeenth century: Claude Lorrain, Gaspard

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

techniques to literary devices, using landscape as narrative.4 Brown, more so than

The Potential of Death by Landscape

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen

The Potential of Death by Landscape

Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen