Landscaping the Three-Volume Novel: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park

Abstract

Abstract The importance to Jane Austen’s writing of the picturesque theory that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century has been well established, from how it influenced stylistic choices to the commentary she offers on land ownership. This article reconsiders the relationship between picturesque theory and plot as it relates to the material forms that shaped the novel in the early nineteenth century, namely the three-volume structure that became the norm in the 1810s. This article argues that, in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, the metaphorical landscape of the plot is shaped in response to this three-volume structure; considering her novels through the lens of prospects and boundaries that correspond to volumes reveals the extent to which her narrative practice responds to the increasingly standard three-volume structure. But whereas the plot of Pride and Prejudice is naturalized within the structure of its volumes, resulting in a plot that conforms to the picturesque’s aim of concealing artifice, Mansfield Park uses landscapes and geographical locations to limit the reader’s perspective, resulting in an abrupt conclusion that draws attention to the boundaries of the book, thereby denaturalizing the plot within it and the ubiquity of the marriage plot more generally.