Jane Austen's English Verdure

This is an exhilarating, ground-breaking study of the role of the natural world in Jane Austen. This is not Nature in the sense of autumnal foliage and gambolling lambs. In this world trees, for example, are first and foremost financial assets and signifiers of cross-generational wealth. There are acute observations on the lands and woods that give Darcy his ‘awefulness’, and on Knightley’s enclosures of common lands, one footpath at a time. Chris Jordan-Clark’s fast-moving chapters make us see the six novels afresh and take us on a tour of Regency England to rival the one that brings Elizabeth Bennet to Pemberley. * Hugh Craig, Emeritus Professor, University of Newcastle, Australia *

Chris Jordan-Clark’s new readings of Austen’s six major novels are unique and genuinely enlightening. Based on her professional experience as a horticulturist, the book dives deeply into the legal and historical concepts of land use, the changing ideas of landscape (and by extension cityscape), and their interactions with class and gender in the period in which Austen was writing. All these ideas, and more, are teased out in close readings of passages that emphasise the understandings that would be natural to the novel’s first readers ¾ knowledge that has often been obscured by the various scholarly and popular fashions of reading Austen prevailing in modern times.
As she writes, ‘Austen’s work is not about the landscape, but by being the story of humans, it becomes also the story of the landscape in which it takes place.’ Jordan-Clark’s deeply informed readings encourage us to revise our concepts of the novel’s characters and their behaviours, and to contemplate the wider complexities of the ‘marriage plot’. She writes with an engaging style and clear focus that keeps the reader turning the page; I will return to my own readings of the novels with an eager curiosity to follow up the implications of Jordan-Clark’s fascinating excavations.

Chris Jordan-Clark is an independent scholar based in Australia. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and previously studied fine arts and urban horticulture, and worked in plant nurseries and garden design.

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