This chapter challenges the conventional view that George Crabbe and Jane Austen were authors opposed to, or insulated from, the theory and practice of the landscape gardener, Humphry Repton. There are two critical commonplaces with respect to Crabbe, and particularly The Borough, which it proposes to dispute. The first concerns Crabbe in his social and political context. The second concerns The Borough, and the reasons for its putative 'failure' as a whole. The chapter concentrates on three of Repton's Red Books for Attingham, Sheringham and Antony House, and considers especially how their theorizing of boundaries in terms of 'yielding' and 'resistance' illuminates Crabbe's long poem, The Borough, and Austen's Mansfield Park. The work of Crabbe and Austen does more than simply articulate an anti-Jacobin suspicion of Reptonian improvement. Within Crabbe's spatial economy liberty is to be internally recovered. Expansiveness, or the absence of proper limits, incurs a spiralling of claustrophobia and confinement.