Austen’s Wordsworth

There is only one direct reference to William Wordsworth in all Jane Austen’s writing. This essay asks why it might be there and what it might mean, weighing up the evidence – stylistic, thematic, journalistic, biographical, naval, and historical – for and against Austen’s possible knowledge of Lyrical Ballads and its author. Their shared ground is discovered in habits of allusion and quotation; in the treatment of memory, forgetting, suffering, damage, and loss; in a commitment to noticing and praising the habitually overlooked; and in transformations of the natural world into a possession of the mind and heart. Mansfield Park, it is argued, proves the most Wordsworthian of Austen’s books.