Abstract

This essay is part of a larger project that interests itself in things that ought to be in literature but are not. Here I consider the park gate lodge, a prominent eighteenth-century architectural phenomenon that in literature, as in life, just gets driven past, all eyes fixated on the great house ahead. It's a prepositional sort of structure, lurking just beneath the texture of the text. Yet its semi-invisibility bends the actions and imaginations of the characters in the novels of Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and John Bunyan. And when we look closely, it comes into focus, forcing us to ask what else we're not seeing in this text, in this world.

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