Jane Austen on Nature: The Novels as Pastoral Literature

Jane Austen’s heroines respond to the power of the natural world, seeking comfort in nature’s calm or referencing ＂verdure＂--meaning fresh greenness and fertility--in relation to their awakening sexuality.

This book focuses on the interactions between Austen’s heroines and the uncontrollable, wild world. Femininity and nature are interwoven; male characters often exploit nature as they exploit women. In the fragment _Sanditon_, Austen satirizes resort developers who commodify both nature and women. As this work discusses, Austen transformed the courtship novel through her use of pastoral language, illuminating themes of greed, the inequality between men and women, and the emotional development of young women in the early nineteenth century.

Mary Jane Curry has been speaking and writing to general readers as well as scholars about nature and pastoral elements in Austen’s fiction since 1994, mostly in Persuasions: The Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America. Retired from university teaching, most recently Zayed University, UAE, she lives in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.