Mapping Jane Austen

Janine Barchas (Matters of Fact in Jane Austen) says that Austen’s world had a nascent celebrity culture. Baronets were well known; court scandals made news. There was an 18th-century equivalent of the National Inquirer 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.

Austen’s attention to detail is legendary, and the legend is genuine in this case. Barchas summarizes the Nabokov’s explorations of Austen’s world: “Nabokov probed the minutely mapped surfaces of Austen’s fiction in the 1950s. In the margins of his battered teaching copy of Mansfield Park, Nabokov observed Austen’s 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’s 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: ‘120 m’ between MP and Portsmouth, ‘50′ from Portsmouth to London, and ‘70 m’ from London.”

He “calculated from specifics of the story that the year of the ‘main action’ was ‘1808,’ explaining in his lecture how he arrived at this date: ‘The 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.’”

He investigated Austen’s flora and fauna as well as her attention to times and places: “As 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.”

Evidence of aesthetic sympathy between the author of Mansfield Park and the author of Lolita.