“Does not it make you think of Cowper?”: Rural Sport in Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries

In Mansfield Park, Rushworth’s plan to “have the avenue at Sotherton down” (55) leads Fanny Price to comment to Edmund “in a low voice”: “Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does not it make you think of Cowper? ‘Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited’” (56). ¹ William Cowper ranked highly in Jane Austen’s estimation; the “Biographical Notice of the Author” states that her “favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse,” and in the Memoir, J.E. Austen-Leigh records: “Amongst her favourite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood high.” ² It is surprising then, as William Deresiewicz points out, that Cowper, “whom virtually everyone acknowledges as a major influence, has scarcely ever been investigated as such,” an oversight which he attributes to the “bias … against … poetry.” ³ Deresiewicz’s Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets reads Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion in the context of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron, but does not include Cowper. While in Deresiewicz’s account of an “early” versus “major” phase, Cowper is an influence Austen eventually outgrew, he is neglected by critics situating the novelist in relation to women’s writing and feminist thought. For example, Claudia Johnson implies that when Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood reads Cowper, Austen merely uses the poet as a screen for her novel’s feminism: “Clearly, Austen 160can, in a sense, get away with a character like Marianne because she suppresses her antecedents—Marianne reads Scott and Cowper, not Hays or Wollstonecraft.” ⁴