Jane Austen and the English Landscape

London: Barn Elms, 1996. Very well illustrated, large horizontal quarto, pp 135, a very good copy in dustwrapper. Very well illustrated, large horizontal quarto, pp 135, a very good copy in dustwrapper. [Landscape historian Batey explores real and fictional settings of Austen's novels. In each chapter she uses a different Austen novel to discuss the style of gardens and landscapes during the early 19th century and Regency England. A continuing theme is the tension between Georgian propriety and the challenging Romantic ideals as they played out in the English landscape. Jane Austen was deeply inspired by the landscape and rural comforts of southern England. Her family's final move to Chawton, in the depths of the Hampshire countryside and so near the Steventon rectory of her childhood, gave her great satisfaction and led to her most creative period. This comprehensive work provides a guide to the ideas and subtleties behind the real and fictional settings of Jane Austen's novels, with illustrations chosen to demonstrate how the changes in response to nature and landscape were reflected by the greatest painters and landscape gardeners of the day. This book should appeal to confirmed Janeites but also to those with an interest in social and landscape history, and for all those who are newly discovering the world of Jane Austen. Photos and reproductions of paintings supplement the text.]. Cloth. Very Good/Very Good.