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{"id":17744,"date":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2570"},"modified":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","slug":"mapping-jane-austen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/12\/mapping-jane-austen\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping Jane Austen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Janine Barchas (Matters of Fact in Jane Austen<\/a>) says that Austen\u2019s world had a nascent celebrity culture. Baronets were well known; court scandals made news. There was an 18th-century equivalent of the National Inquirer<\/em> and paparazzi. Austen knew this world, and she makes references to it in her novels. She is not the ahistorical, isolated spinster of legend. She was engaged with the celebrity culture of her time.<\/p>\n

Austen\u2019s attention to detail is legendary, and the legend is genuine in this case. Barchas summarizes the Nabokov\u2019s explorations of Austen\u2019s world: \u201cNabokov probed the minutely mapped surfaces of Austen\u2019s fiction in the 1950s. In the margins of his battered teaching copy of Mansfield Park, Nabokov observed Austen\u2019s handling of temporal and spatial distance. There and in his lecture notes, he drew charts, maps, and diagrams, made lists of dates and character names, and calculated distances, incomes, or ages from the numerical information provided by Austen. Guided by Austen\u2019s descriptions, he mapped the grounds at Sotherton Court, sketched a barouche to determine the spatial arrangements of the characters in a carriage, and laid out the rooms of Mansfield with architectural confidence. . . . Nabokov triangulated the presumed location of Mansfield Park from the stated distances to real-world cities: \u2018120 m\u2019 between MP and Portsmouth, \u201850\u2032 from Portsmouth to London, and \u201870 m\u2019 from London.\u201d<\/p>\n

He \u201ccalculated from specifics of the story that the year of the \u2018main action\u2019 was \u20181808,\u2019 explaining in his lecture how he arrived at this date: \u2018The ball at Mansfield Park is held on Thursday the twenty-second of December, and if we look through our old calendars, we will see that only in 1808 could 22 December fall on Thursday.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He investigated Austen\u2019s flora and fauna as well as her attention to times and places: \u201cAs a committed lepidopterist and naturalist, Nabokov even underlined the varieties Austen assigned to her trees, annotating in pen, then pencil, the scattered references to fruits, plants, and landscape features.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evidence of aesthetic sympathy between the author of Mansfield Park<\/em> and the author of Lolita<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"