The Land and the Big House

Abstract

Austen’s novels are neither vehicles for the articulation of contemporary debates about the political, economic and moral issues of property, land-ownership, the distribution of wealth, and labour, or anything else, nor channels for the broadcast of her own opinions about or interventions into those debates; they are novels. Nonetheless, as Eagleton points out, the experiments in fiction of Austen’s time had their roots in a period he refers to as one of ‘vision and anxiety’, in ‘new liberations of energy and new forms of repression’.¹ Attention is paid to rural property, houses and land, and to the complex and changing ways in which these are owned and used. The semi-natural landscape may be valued above the Improved, and the country over the town, but the estate and the wider countryside are described in ways nostalgic or simplistic or reactionary only as a facet of characterisation. Descriptions by the narrative voices of the novels of rural scenes suggest an understanding of the politics of pastoral² and of the relations of power inherent in relations of property.³