"Young ladies are delicate plants": Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism

By annotating how in Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey Jane Austen tracks between the novelist's domain and the naturalist's, this essay seeks to unsettle some entrenched assumptions about her relationship to realism—and the ideological work of naturalization that realism is said to sponsor—as well as to romanticism. Austen's era, which we customarily identify as the time of a romantic return to nature, was marked by conflicts over what nature did and did not include—conflicts between, in the parlance of the period, "the botanist" and "the florist," between an account of nature as that which was given and an account of nature as that which (as with the modern nurseryman's new hybrids and luxuriants) might be manufactured. In arranging for her young heroines' stories of growing up to unfold in the "artificial climates" of modern fashionable gardening and amidst "florists' flowers," Austen deliberately works through those conflicts. She inhabits the plot of "natural development" to which she is often linked in elusively oppositional ways.