In Delight and Prejudice (1813), when heroine Elizabeth Bennet arrives at Netherfield Park with “her petticoat six inches deep in mud”, she walks no longer simplest in the course of the fields of Hertfordshire, however into considered one of literature’s maximum memorable photographs of ladies’s independence.
Her resolution to stroll on my own, “above her ankles in dirt”, is met with horror. “What could she mean by it?” sneers Omit Bingley. “It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence.” And but, in that stroll – unaccompanied, retro, unbothered – Elizabeth unearths extra about her spirit and autonomy than any parlour dialog may.
For Austen’s heroines, independence – then again “abominable” – steadily starts on foot. Elizabeth is also probably the most iconic of Austen’s pedestrians, however she is a ways from on my own. Throughout Austen’s novels, girls are continuously in movement: strolling via nation lanes, walled gardens, shrubberies, town streets and seashore hotels.
Those don’t seem to be idle tours. They’re socially legible acts, formed through magnificence, decorum, and gender – but steadily quietly proof against them.
This newsletter is a part of a sequence commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s delivery. In spite of having revealed simplest six books, she is among the best-known authors in historical past. Those articles discover the legacy and lifetime of this fantastic author.
Fanny Worth, the steadily underestimated heroine of Mansfield Park (1814), is generally noticed as timid and passive. But underneath her reserved external lies a quiet however decided spirit.
“She takes her own independent walk whenever she can”, remarks Mrs Norris disapprovingly. “She certainly has a little spirit of secrecy, and independence, and nonsense about her.” Austen’s collection of “nonsense” this is revealing: Fanny’s want for solitude and self-direction isn’t progressive, however it’s gently subversive. In an international providing girls little room for self-assertion, her steps develop into acts of resistance.
When Jane Fairfax, constrained through magnificence and circumstance in Emma (1815), declines a carriage trip, she asserts: “I would rather walk … quick walking will refresh me.” It’s a apparently modest resolution, however one layered with importance. To stroll is to keep watch over your individual motion, to take care of autonomy and face up to the genteel suffocation of being continuously noticed or helped.
Anne (performed through Dakota Johnson within the Netflix adaptation) takes within the coastal air of Lyme Regis in Persuasion.
Courtesy of Netflix
In Persuasion (1817), Anne Elliot’s tale displays strolling as a trail to renewal. Reserved and lengthy careworn through remorseful about, Anne reveals recovery within the coastal air of Lyme Regis. As she walks alongside the Cobb, Austen notes that “she was looking remarkably well … having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind … and by the animation of eye which it had also produced”.
Her emotional reawakening is framed as a bodily one. Strolling turns into no longer simplest healing however transformative – a as far back as herself.
Now not all of Austen’s walks are reflective or restorative. Some are decidedly social. Lydia and Kitty Bennet’s widespread walks to Meryton in Delight and Prejudice, as an example, are pushed as a lot through buying groceries as through the hope of romantic encounters.
Austen notes the “most convenient distance” of the village, the place “their eyes were immediately wandering up in the street in quest of the officers”. Those ladies have been extra fascinated about uniforms than in bonnets.
But even this behaviour hints at one thing subtler. For younger, single girls, buying groceries and social errands have been some of the few socially sanctioned causes to transport independently via public house. Those tours introduced moments of visibility, mobility, and the opportunity of courtship – then again calmly pursued.
Kitty and Lydia stroll to Meryton to be able to stumble upon the officials.
Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey (1817), a loyal reader of gothic fiction, fuses her walks with creativeness. As she strolls alongside the Avon River with the Tilneys, she muses: “It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Strolling turns into an act of imaginative projection, the place the bounds between fiction and fact blur within the thoughts of a heroine studying to navigate each the sector and herself.
Jane Austen the walker
Austen’s fiction attracts a lot of its energy from her personal reports. She was once, through her personal admission, a “desperate walker”, hardly deterred through climate, terrain or propriety.
A watercolour of Jane Austen through her sister Cassandra, appearing her having a look out to sea. It was once painted whilst they have been on vacation in Lyme Regis in 1804.
Wiki Commons
Her letters, written from Bathtub, Steventon, Chawton and somewhere else, seize the physicality and enjoyment of strolling in shiny, steadily playful element. Those glimpses into her day-to-day lifestyles divulge no longer simplest her attachment to motion but additionally the quiet autonomy it afforded her.
In 1805, Austen writes from Bathtub: “Yesterday was a busy day with me, or at least with my feet & my stockings; I was walking almost all day long.” A number of years later, in 1813, she studies with unmistakable reduction: “I walked to Alton, & dirt excepted, found it delightful … before I set out we were visited by several callers, all of whom my mother was glad to see, & I very glad to escape.”
Most likely maximum revealing is an previous letter from December 1798, by which Austen describes a unprecedented solitary tour: “I enjoyed the hard black frosts of last week very much, & one day while they lasted walked to Deane by myself. I do not know that I ever did such a thing in my life before.” The remark registers the newness and boldness of a lady strolling on my own.
In an age the place strolling is as soon as once more praised for its bodily and psychological advantages, Austen’s fiction reminds us that those virtues don’t seem to be new. Her characters had been strolling for hundreds of years – via dust, throughout magnificence obstacles and in opposition to expectation.
They stroll in pursuit of readability, connection, break out and self-hood. Their steps – measured or impulsive, solitary or social – mark turning issues of their lives. And in an international designed to stay them desk bound, their strolling stays a thorough act.
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