There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!” And following the latter train of thought, she soon afterwards added: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field, never thought of as any thing, or capable of becoming any thing and now it is converted into a walk, and it would be difficult to say whether most valuable as a convenience or as an ornament and perhaps in another three years we may be forgetting – almost forgetting what it was before. “This is pretty – very pretty,” said Fanny, looking around her as they were thus sitting together one day: “Every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. She says she’s really looking forward to the upcoming AGM in Montreal, “on what is certainly, because of its extraordinary depths, my favourite Austen novel.” Lorrie has reviewed numerous books on Austen (including my own Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, in The Dalhousie Review ), and she has given talks at several JASNA AGMs and Toronto JASNA chapter meetings. My blog post here attempts a small part of a much fuller argument on that subject published recently in Eighteenth-Century Fiction titled ‘Remembering Nature.

modern scientific ideas of ‘nature,’ a quarrel with profound implications for understanding the foundation of morals in her novels. “Mansfield Park has made me realize,” Lorrie says, “the extent to which Austen vigorously, consciously engaged in the eighteenth-century ‘Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns’ about Aristotelian vs. I’m very happy to introduce her guest post on the “garden-gazing” scene in Mansfield Park. She has published a book on William Blake, and she says initially she was especially interested in Jane Austen’s relation to Romanticism in Persuasion. Lorrie Clark is an Associate Professor of English at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, where she teaches courses on Milton, eighteenth-century literature, Romanticism, history of the novel, tragedy, Jane Austen, and Joseph Conrad.

For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

Eighteenth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Austen mansfield park