"I Have Just Learnt to Love a Hyacinth": Jane Austen's Heroines in Their Novelistic Landscape

She was a warm and judicious admirer of landscape, both in nature and on canvas. At a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men. --Henry Austen (Biographical Notice) EVEN AS A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL, Jane Austen had a sharp appreciation of landscape and landscape art. When we read Evelyn and see Jane Austen's mildly satirical view of perhaps one of most beautiful Spots in south of England (MW 180), we can smile at hero Mr. Gower's enchantment with a house in the exact centre of a small circular paddock, borders of poplars and firs alternatively placed in three rows and--best yet--a field grazed by four white Cows which were disposed at equal distances from each other (181). Landscape strongly influenced Jane Austen's early works as well as her novels, and situating of her heroines in that landscape reflected Austen's sense of aesthetic geography. Austen knew that a way of seeing and a way of being within a landscape were crucial for her novelistic heroines. She worked to create spaces for her heroines to negotiate positions of greater power with more opportunities for freedom and happiness on their own terms. Here we will examine how Austen's own ways of seeing early nineteenth-century English countryside are linked with her heroines' abilities to find prospects and refuges in their novelistic landscapes. As we know from her brother's Biographical Notice, Jane Austen read William Gilpin and knew about his prescribed ways of viewing landscape through a Claude glass, a mirror device that allowed viewer to frame scene, leaving out areas considered less than picturesque. Gilpin recommended that travelers use a Claude glass to frame landscape, emphasizing correct picturesque scene. His books instructed viewer where to stand, what to keep in view, and what to leave out. As a girl, Jane Austen learnt to love a hyacinth, so to speak, in Gilpinesque way, and she also knew early on how to mock such artificial constraints, taking care to place her heroines in locations which were geographically (and emotionally) advantageous to them. topography of Hampshire and Somerset, even today, gives us a number of views with which Jane Austen was familiar. hedgerows near her first home in Steventon have been discussed by her nephew in his Memoir. First, he describes countryside: It is certainly not a picturesque country; it presents no grand or extensive views; but features are small rather than plain. surface continually swells and sinks, but hills are not bold, nor valleys deep; and though it is sufficiently well clothed with woods and hedgerows, yet poverty of soil in most places prevents timber from attaining a large size. (Austen-Leigh 285) Soon after, he gives a description of hedgerows: But chief beauty of Steventon consisted in its hedgerows. A hedgerow, in that country, does not mean a thin formal line of quickset, but an irregular border of copse-wood, and timber, often wide enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart track. Under its shelter earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found.... Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from parsonage garden. One, a continuation of turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming southern boundary of home meadows; and was formed into a rustic shrubbery, with occasional seats, entitled The Wood Walk. (286-87) So we can tell kind of landscape with which Jane Austen was familiar in Hampshire, Steventon being only about eighteen miles from her last home in Chawton. Later we will see how hyacinths and hedgerows serve her heroines. As her early heroine, Catherine Morland, learned conventions of landscape art from lover/mentor Henry Tilney, so Jane Austen learned from Gilpin how male proprietary landscape owners viewed scene. …