Austen Years by Rachel Cohen

Author:Rachel Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Mansfield Park is a bit like Cinderella, and the two stepsisters are Fanny’s cousins Maria and Julia, who ridicule her and expect her to be of service to them. Maria and Julia are fitted out to marry wealth, and fairly early on, Maria makes what is considered a good catch, the very rich Mr. Rushworth, “a heavy young man, with not more than common sense.” But he owns Sotherton, and the grounds are so very extensive. It is decided that Sotherton must be “improved,” by bringing in Humphry Repton, an actual landscape architect, omnipresent in Austen’s time. She was a bit skeptical of Repton’s vaunted powers.

Talking over the improvements, it transpires that Mr. Rushworth will probably begin by cutting down the great avenue of trees that has been the estate’s glory for generations. “Cut down an avenue!” Fanny says under her breath to Edmund. “Does it not make you think of Cowper?” And she quotes the poet’s line: “‘Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.’” Edmund understands how important habit is for Fanny to uphold her places. At another moment, he says she is “of all human creatures the one, over whom habit had most power, and novelty least.” Now he only says ruefully, “I am afraid the avenue stands a bad chance, Fanny.”

A day trip is arranged so that the characters may lay plans for the estate’s improvement, and Fanny’s one hope for the day is to see the avenue before it is cut down. Then she will hold a picture of it in her mind. The other young people wander about the grounds, seeking and losing one another like the lovers in the wood beyond Athens in Shakespeare’s play. To Fanny, experience often comes in negation. She is fatigued and sits waiting; no one comes to her and she misses the avenue by a few minutes and steps.

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