ABSTRACT
In this essay, Tara Goshal Wallace reads Austen’s Persuasion alongside Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian and demonstrates Scott and Austen address nuances and variations of women’s mobility omitted from earlier feminist texts. Neither Anne Elliot nor Jeanie Deans belongs in the collection of victimised women, epitomised by Burney’s Juliet, who are forced to endure involuntary and painful walking. They represent instead the reflections of two innovative, confident (and now canonical) authors who explore, complicate, and sometimes collapse the space between privileged/male walking and victimised/female wandering.
