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MISS AUSTEN'S COUNTRY (1875)
Anonymous
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Lovely descriptions of Jane Austen's country, with references of her works.
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"The boundaries of Miss Austen's country are just vague enough to make speculation respecting them pleasant. She liked the cosy, rich, refined, cultivated "Home" counties, and the snuggest, most prosperous parts of them. Mansfield Park was in Hertfordshire, and have we not seen many a parsonage which might be that very home in which Dr. Grant outraged the housewifely memories of Mrs. Norris by the introduction of a round dinner-table, and made little of the flavour of the fruit upon the apricot-tree which had "cost her – no, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but she had seen the bill, and it had cost seven shillings, and was charged as a Moor-Park !" Rosings was in Kent, and when we drive past those trim, lovely hedgerows and see the plantations beyond, can we not make choice among the former of the garden-boundary of that abode in which Mrs. Collins dexterously assigned the front room to her husband, so that he might relieve her of his society while he watched for the pony-carriage in which "Lady Catharine and Miss de Bourgh did his humble dwelling the honour of passing it several times a day," and see, on the fringes of the latter, the very spot where Mr. Darcy put his angry love-letter into the hand of Elizabeth Bennet, to whom, by the way, one always grudges Darcy and Pemberley a little? But it is not "Pride and Prejudice," or "Mansfield Park," which travels closely with the visitor to the Box-Hill region, so much as "Emma," that quite incomparable novel, in which the unique talent of the wonderful woman whose works may fail to charm us in our youth, but are an ever-increasing joy to our middle-age, is at its perfection. From the height we overlook the whole of her especial country (the Dashwoods were only episodically located in Devonshire, and there can be no doubt that Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth ultimately settled within easy reach of town): but Box Hill itself and all the rich and beautiful valley beneath it, are the places which we identify with "Emma." ... "
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" ... It will be so charming to know that one's topography cannot be far wrong, because Emma and her party had only seven miles to drive to Box Hill, and Hartfield was sixteen miles from London."
"It ought to be quite enough for anybody, with the touch of the autumn loveliness upon it, the delicious stillness, and the sweet, fresh air. It has every kind of beauty that the "woodland wild" can combine, from the tender grace of the slight ash and beech trees, through which the sun's rays strike into the underwood, revealing marvellous treasures of multitudinous growth and infinite variety of colour, the watchful processional formality of poplars, whose front ranks stand across country in the valley below, the massive grandeur of great acorn-laden oaks and wide-spreading, sturdy elms; firs with flame-tinted stems and storm-defying heads; gloomy, bitter, poison-fruited yew, and solemn cypress; to the masses of the sharp and shining-leaved tree, growing thick and black-stemmed in the dense darkness, which give the place its name of "Box Hill." It has dells and downs, steep, heather-bordered road, and sharp-declining hillside, openings into undulating glades, o'erarching avenues, tunnels of shade of solemn blackness, wide stretches of green-velvet turf, dense thickets in which the crushed confusion of trees defies division, grand, solitary forest-lords standing in isolated majesty, each one a picture and a marvel. It has a gorgeous tangle of autumn flower and red poison-fruit, and acres of blackberry-bushes, with a purple bloom upon their berries. There are weird paths in it, with vistas into the wood, where the stems, shut from the sun, are bleached, and sickly, and distorted, like Doré's dreadful trees, with pain and writhing in their twisted limbs; and there are broad, jocund ways, with the generous sunlit growths bordering them, adown which the wood-nymphs might dance today without surprising anybody, so surely do they seem to have been laid out on purpose; and here the giant stems are dight in moss like emerald velvet, and touched with gem-like flashes of ruby and topaze colour. There is a blue sky, with a transparent veil of hurrying clouds before it, a strong stirring and sound in the trees and the underwood; the ear might easily cheat itself into a belief that the plain below is a lake; but on the brow of the hill the whole superb scene is unrolled before one; forty miles of rich country laugh under the sunshine, and the little village of Brockham stands in its prim prettiness in the foreground of the valley, like a Dutch village just taken out of a toy-box, set up, and ready to be packed up again when the private view shall be over."
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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.
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