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Abstract
This article argues that in Jane Austen's work there is an affiliation between the experience of landscape and the forms that fictional works can take. This is evident in 'Catharine, or the Bower' where an analogy is set up between the reading of a novel and travel through a picturesque landscape, a connection that is returned to in Pride and Prejudice. This affiliation can be contextualized first by reference to Austen's comments in her letters about narrative form, and then by reference to contemporary criticism of the novel, in particular that of Anna Barbauld. Barbauld overtly uses landscape for narratological purposes in her introductory essay to Samuel Richardson's Correspondence, alluding to Uvedale Price's Essay on the Picturesque to extol Richardson's formal achievements in Clarissa. Austen's views on narrative organization and on landscape design strongly resonate with Barbauld's, and both writers evoke the picturesque to provide a formalist critique of the novel.
Reading and Travelling
In her early, unfinished novel 'Catharine, or the Bower', dated 1792 in the manuscript 'Volume the Third', Jane Austen sets up an analogy between the inattentive reader and the inattentive traveller through the character of Camilla Stanley. When the heroine Kitty asks Camilla which of Charlotte Smith's novels she prefers, Camilla responds:
'Oh! dear, I think there is no comparison between them - Emmeline is so much better than any of the others -'
'Many people think so, I know; but there does not appear so great a disproportion in their Merits to me; do you think it is better written?'
'Oh! I do not know anything about that - but it is better in every thing - Besides, Ethelinde is so long -'
'That is a very common Objection I believe, said Kitty, but for my part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short'.
'So do I, only I get tired of it before it is finished'.
'But did not you find the story of Ethelinde very interesting? And the Descriptions of Grasmere, are not they Beautiful?'
'Oh! I missed them all, because I was in such a hurry to know the end of it -'. Then from an easy transition she added, 'We are going to the Lakes this Autumn, and I...