‘Crowd in a little room’

Abstract

Fanny Price, who was ‘disposed to think the influence of London very much at war with all respectable attachments’ (Mansfield Park, ch. 45), may have been partly voicing the author’s view on the subject. Although London and Bath often feature in Jane Austen’s novels as settings for developments in the plot — serving to bring people together, to separate or to regroup them, or to dislocate them from the familiar context — the important events and the final resolutions of the novels always take place in the countryside, which provides the stable, unhurried norm of her fictional world. Her characters are occasionally made to visit the urban centres because displacement from their home surroundings can set the plot in motion, making room for complexities in human interaction; but none of her major characters derives his or her durable values from the cities. Only the Crawfords have been brought up in London, and this is responsible not only for their glamour and wit but also their underlying brittleness and falsity, which proves such a disruptive influence in the life of Mansfield.

Oh! Miss Woodhouse, the comfort of being some-times alone!

Emma

Could they be perpetrated, without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is in such footing where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies ….

Northanger Abbey