Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen (review)

In Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen, Barbara Britton Wenner applies contemporary theories of aesthetic geography to the landscapes of Austen's fiction. Her study offers new ways of reading Austen's settings, and demonstrates their centrality to the text. By close examination of their environments, Britton Wenner questions the responses of Austen's heroines to the landscapes which they are both part of and outside, at once figures in the landscape and observers of it.

Britton Wenner's comment that readers of Austen's novels 'might wonder how an entire book could be written about her landscapes' seems somewhat disingenuous, considering not only the number of critical works which treat the subject but also the industries built up around Austen tourism, which is directed as much at sites mentioned in the novels (or their cinematic stand-ins) as it is toward those connected with her life. Austen's readers' enthusiasm for visiting the 'real' locations of the novels, and for seeing themselves in her landscapes, is frequently symbolised by a comment attributed to Tennyson, viewing the Cobb at Lyme: 'Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth. Show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell'. The personal act of literary tourism which Britton Wenner recounts in the book's preface is supported by the museums and guide books which cater to readers seeking first-hand experience of the landscapes so sparingly described in the novels.

The great popular interest which Austen's contemporaries took in landscapes – in viewing, painting, theorising and creating them – along with Henry Austen's comment in the 'Biographical Notice' that his sister was 'enamoured of Gilpin on the picturesque', sufficiently explain Austen's repeated use of the tropes of landscape theory in her novels, from Catherine Morland's rejection of 'the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape', to Emma Woodhouse's satisfaction in the 'English verdure, English culture, English comfort' which forms the view from Donwell Abbey. Alistair Duckworth's The Improvement of the Estate was the first full-length study of landscape in Austen, and in the decades since its publication in 1971 several critics and biographers have revisited the subject, including Roger Sales, Mavis Batey and Peter Knox-Shaw. It is Jill Heydt-Stevenson's feminist re-evaluation of the picturesque movement in relation to Austen's writing that seems closest to Britton Wenner's concerns in this book. Heydt-Stevenson, like Duckworth, Knox-Shaw and others, examined Austen's landscapes from the perspective of the picturesque discourse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Britton Wenner's strategy is to evaluate Austen's landscapes in light of twentieth-century geographical aesthetics, principally the work of Jay Appleton (from whom she borrows the terms 'prospect' and 'refuge') and, to a lesser extent, Gillian Rose's Feminism and Geography. Appleton's prospect-refuge theory is a component of habitat theory which, crudely, suggests that landscapes are pleasing insofar as they appear to offer a good chance of survival to the viewer. An ideal landscape contains sites both of prospect and refuge – as Britton Wenner puts it, the landscape is then 'a good place to hide and a good place from which to seek'. Britton Wenner finds this theoretical framework, which has been applied to the work of other Romantic writers, helpful in understanding landscapes in Austen's novels, so that, for instance, the seat Fanny Price finds at Sotherton offers her both 'refuge' (somewhere she can safely rest) and 'prospect' (a good vantage point from which to observe the behaviour of her companions). Britton Wenner also considers the liminal spaces which Austen's characters so often seem to inhabit, from Elizabeth Bennet, walking the boundary at Rosings, to Fanny, again, who is indeterminately 'out, or not out' – out in society, or out of place at Mansfield. Another frequently discussed possibility is that of 'death by landscape', a...