THE CITY IN JANE AUSTEN'S SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, MANSFIELD PARK AND NORTHANGER ABBEY

Abstract

A number of Jane Austen's biographers and literary critics have suggested that Austen disliked the city. Their conclusion is largely drawn from her letters and her negative portrayal of the city in her novels which fits the enduring image of the city as a place of moral corruption and vice. This thesis will argue that although Austen did prefer rural to urban life, she was not blind to the variety that the city offered and that her novels portray not only negative but also positive aspects of the city. The thesis employs Peter Borsay's history in The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660-1770 (1989) which illustrates the economic, social and cultural revival of the city in the long eighteenth century (1660-1830), which contributed to new image of the city as a place of progress, civilisation and pleasure, and Raymond Williams' argument in The Country and the City (1973) against the age-old binary opposition of the country as representing peace and virtue and the city as representing vice and moral corruption. By analysing Sense and Sensibility (1811), Northanger Abbey (1818) and Mansfield Park (1814) in the socio-cultural context of the long eighteenth century, the thesis seeks to illustrate the complex or even positive portrayal of the city in these selected novels, showing that the depiction of London in the first novel is different from that in the sentimental novel which it satirises and also how the ways in which the picture of the dangerous city in Northanger Abbey is ameliorated through Austen's satirical presentation of the heroine's rural characteristics and how the urban intruders in the last novel can be both destructive and beneficial to the countryside.