![]() I agree with Ford, but it’s also at this point that I wince. You sit about in morning rooms with the characters.” In The March of Literature (1938), Ford Madox Ford wrote: “Society was rendered by Jane Austen with a vividness that made the reader feel that he was actually sitting in an armchair in Mansfield Park … That is it. ![]() ![]() Jane Austen doesn’t go in for florid description, but there’s something about her prose that puts you right in the scene. In fact, I feel like I have already seen it all. I can also sympathise with the famous (if possibly apocryphal) story of Lord Tennyson interrupting his friends on a visit to Lyme Regis when they started talking about the 1685 rebellion and demanding: “Don’t talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth, show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell.” It’s exactly what I’ll be trying to picture next time I visit Lyme Regis. He quite fired up in defence of it, insisting that it was the most beautiful of her works. ![]() On one occasion I said that I had found Persuasion rather dull. When I was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr Whewell, then a fellow and afterwards master of the college, often spoke to me with admiration of Miss Austen’s novels. ![]()
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