The city and the countryside

This chapter discusses the ambivalence of relations between the city and the countryside in literary representations from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. The perceived limitations of rural life affirm the dominance of cities as centres which cast the land as a margin, but the countryside also has a sense of time passing, a kind of mortality. The chapter explores the writing of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte, and to cases of Portuguese and German writing in which landscape reflects states of psyche. Wild nature as described by Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights is forlorn, where plans are undone and desires unleashed. It envelops the walker in its heavy rain but is not serene. Like an inverse Eden, the moors in Wuthering Heights are where characters wander in weather as doom-laden as themselves.