‘To hear my uncle talk of the West Indies’

Abstract

Even though Jane Austen seems to belong essentially to the green English countryside with neatly trimmed hedge-rows before the landscape was sullied by factory smoke, or hybridised by contact with the colonies, it must be recognised that in the late eighteenth century, when Jane Austen was growing up, England’s economy was already inextricably tied up with territories overseas. Overt and incidental references to these newly appropriated lands punctuate the literature of the time — fiction and non-fiction alike — permeating sometimes even to the level of metaphors.

‘The evenings do not appear long to me, I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together.

Mansfield Park

‘What a great traveller you must have been, ma’am!’ said Mrs Musgrove to Mrs Croft.

‘Pretty well, Ma’am, in the fifteen years of my marriage; though many women have done more I have crossed the Atlantic four times, and have been one to the East Indies and back again.’

Persuasion