I begin with a letter that Jane Austen writes to her sister Cassandra on 14 September 1804, the earliest to survive after a three-year gap.  On this day, both sisters are at nearby but rather different spots in the county of Dorset on the south coast of England.  Cassandra has recently left swanky, upscale Weymouth, where, if you were lucky, or perhaps unlucky, you might glimpse King George III emerging into the sea from a bathing machine.

1 John Colley Nixon, Royal Dipping (1789).  Wikimedia Commons.
(Click here to see a larger version.)

Jane is some miles to the west in the less fashionable town of Lyme Regis, a place declined from its early modern heyday as a trading port and now (in the words of a distinguished later resident, the postmodern novelist John Fowles) “very much a tourist-oriented town by 1800.”  New trades and services were springing up (mercers and mantua-makers, circulating libraries, assembly rooms, bathing stations), but Lyme still enjoyed “a reputation for its cheapness and simplicity compared to its great rival across the bay” (Fowles, “Lyme” 2).  Between the censuses of 1801 and 1811 the population expanded from 1,451 to 1,925; a visitor of 1806 called Lyme “a sort of Brighton in miniature” (Lane 19–20). 

2 Lyme Regis from the Charmouth Road (c.1840).  West Dorset District Council/Dorset Coast Digital Archive. 
(Click here to see a larger version.)

Yet Lyme was no mere upstart resort in the style of Sanditon, the fictional setting for Austen’s unfinished last fiction about real-estate speculation and medical consumerism; it was a far more interesting, indeed tumultuous, place than its new veneer of Georgian civility would suggest.  Tumultuous in two senses especially.  First, and quite visibly, Lyme bore the weight at every turn of its fractious, sanguinary history in the century before Austen’s birth.  The town was a hotbed of Puritan revolution in the 1640s, when it withstood, at much human cost on both sides, a failed eight-week siege by Royalist forces.  Decades later, it was the epicentre of the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rebellion of 1685, which led in turn to the notorious Bloody Assizes following Monmouth’s defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor.  In the aftermath, the hanging, drawing, and quartering of Lyme citizens implicated in the rising was performed for maximum impact on the town beach, with the tarred bodies displayed on the streets for three further years:  a communal trauma from which Tom Paulin finds quiet echoes in Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s great survivor novel of 1719 (Paulin 80–104). 

That’s the history; then there was the geology, the ocean, the crumbling cliff, the arresting view into what we now call deep time.  Alongside the vast new geochronology that was emerging in Romantic-era science, writes Noah Heringman, “the thin glaze of human history was comparatively trivial, incommensurable with the grand narratives preserved in strata that were pushed down deep into the earth’s crust, only to resurface tens or hundreds of millions of years later” (Deep Time 1).  Lyme sits on a spectacular stretch of dramatically eroding coastline, in our own day branded the Jurassic Coast and designated a UNESCO World Heritage site for its display of geological formations and processes across, almost continuously, the entire Mesozoic era of 185 million years.  For artists of the Romantic period, the surrounding coastline offered lessons in sublime evocation that were best exploited by Austen’s exact contemporary J. M. W. Turner, whose watercolour of c.1834, now in the Cincinnati Art Museum, is one of several to show humanity dwarfed and struggling, indeed almost overwhelmed, by the immensity and power of elemental forces.1 

3 J. M. W. Turner, Lyme Regis, Dorset (c.1834).  Cincinnati Art Museum 1940.953, Wikimedia Commons.
(Click here to see a larger version.) 

4 Postcard from Duncan Grant to Vanessa Bell, 6 April 1942.  Tate Gallery Archive 8010/5/1800, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED.

Yet it’s not only to experience oceanic sublimity, or to glimpse what in Austen’s day was already being called “the abyss of time” (Playfair, qtd. in Heringman, Deep Time 242), that visitors have been drawn to Lyme.  There are also the literary tourists who come to pace Lyme’s massive, sinuous harbour wall, known as the Cobb, a wonder of medieval engineering built in the thirteenth century and continuously repaired since then against the ravages of storms.  Pilgrims retrace the steps of Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman as portrayed by a windswept Meryl Streep in the Harold Pinter-scripted movie of 2001; more now follow the skips of Timothée Chalamet in Wonka (2023).  Above all, they search for the very spot on which the plot of Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion (1817), turns—when flirty Miss Musgrove jumps into Captain Wentworth’s arms, Wentworth disastrously flubs the catch, and resourceful Anne Elliot saves the day.  A wartime postcard sent by the artist Duncan Grant to another Bloomsbury insider, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, shows the prime candidate for the episode, a precipitous flight of steps cut between two levels of the Cobb’s inner wall. On the back of the postcard, Grant quotes from a later chapter (2: 6) of Persuasion:  “The Admiral began / ‘But first of all you must tell me the name of the young lady I am going to talk about[.]  That young lady you know that we have all been so concerned for.  The Miss Musgrove that all this has been happening to[.]  Her Christian name:  I always forget her Christian name.’”  Admiral Croft, and perhaps Grant himself, might be forgiven:  Romantic-era fiction is full of feather-brained Lydias, heirs to giddy Lydia Melford in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) or ditzy Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), and Miss Musgrove is in many ways a Lydia.  But Austen never does exactly what you expect, and of course it’s Louisa Musgrove. 

Austen’s letter from Lyme (14 September 1804) is a good deal longer than Grant’s postcard, with the odd flourish of witty mischief, but much of it routine.  It tells us something, however, about her familiarity with the place and its social affordances as she would represent them in Persuasion.  She seems to have been there throughout the summer and has recently suffered a “fever & indisposition”—but that’s fine, she tells Cassandra, since being ill is “all the fashion this week in Lyme.”  The good news is that Miss Cove has been saved by a “timely Emetic” from one of the town’s tourist-oriented physicians; Miss Bonham has been in the care of another but is still for some reason “very tall & does not come to the Rooms,” meaning the Assembly Rooms.  One hopes vomiting Miss Cove stays home as well, but Austen doesn’t say.  She herself has been frequenting the Rooms, where her mother plays every night a “pool of Commerce,” a card-trading game that comes over badly in Austen’s novels (scheming Isabella Thorpe plays it in Northanger Abbey; trusty Jane Bennet dislikes it in Pride and Prejudice).  She has also been at the Thursday night ball, with no partner until approached by one Mr. Crawford for the third and fourth dances; she leaves before she can be pestered further by “a new, odd looking Man who had been eyeing me for some time, & at last without any introduction asked me if I meant to dance again.”  This uncouth type is one of several: “I imagine him to belong to the Hon^ble Barnwalls, who are the son & son’s wife of an Irish Viscount—bold, queerlooking people, just fit to be Quality at Lyme,” where the bar of acceptable gentility is plainly lower than at smart Weymouth, and certainly Bath or London.  Austen has also been walking on the Cobb with a new though uninspiring acquaintance, who “is very conversable in a common way; I do not perceive Wit or Genius.”  The family’s lodgings are adequate but inconvenient and none too clean, and some of the furniture needs repair:  “I have written to M^r Pyne [the landlord], on the subject of the broken Lid;—it was valued by Anning here, we were told, at five shillings”—which, Austen adds, “appeared to us beyond the value of all the Furniture in the room together.”  More below about Mr. Anning. 

5 Cassandra Austen, watercolor of Jane Austen (1804).  Wikimedia Commons.

So it all sounds just a bit dreary, the daily rounds of polite B-list sociability clouding out the sublime immensity all around.  But the Austens felt sufficiently drawn to Lyme to make at least two stays there, apparently both extended, and given the lacunae in surviving correspondence in the period of their most frequent coastal expeditions, there may be other unattested visits (Le Faye 289, 300–01; Lane 25–29).  It was almost certainly at Lyme, seated on undulating ground and contemplating the horizon, that Austen sat for Cassandra’s enigmatic watercolor sketch of 1804, with its uncanny and rather apt anticipation of modernist back-of-the-head portraiture (René Magritte’s “Not To Be Reproduced,” for example, or Cecil Beaton’s celebrated photoshoot of Henry Green).2 

 In time, Austen herself became one of the chief reasons for making a visit.  Here is Hallam Tennyson, son of the poet laureate, describing a tour undertaken by his father in 1867: 

He was led on to Lyme by the description of the place in Miss Austen’s Persuasion, walking thither the nine miles over the hills from Bridport.  On his arrival he called on Palgrave, and, refusing all refreshment, he said at once:  “Now take me to the Cobb, and show me the steps from which Louisa Musgrove fell.”  Palgrave and he then walked to the undercliff, “a noble natural terrace, edging the sea and tossed into endless small mounds and valleys.”3 

More below of this spectacular “undercliff” and Austen’s representation of it in Persuasion. 

The abyss of time 

Perhaps the strangest thing about Tennyson’s visit is that his reason for undertaking it was Persuasion, not palaeontology—for even more than concussed Miss Musgrove, the deep tropical seas of Jurassic Dorset and the prehistoric marine life now embedded in its cliffs made Lyme and neighboring Charmouth loom large in the Victorian mind.  Visually, the locus classicus is in fact pre-Victorian:  Henry De la Beche’s rather playful 1830 watercolour Duria Antiquior (a more ancient Dorset), which circulated widely, indeed internationally, in lithographic copies.  As Michael Taylor writes in his recent history of nineteenth-century fossil-hunting and what he calls “the war between science and religion,” the vastly expanded timelines posited by the new geology and the “impossible monsters” disinterred by the new palaeontology posed a vertiginous challenge to biblical literalism and more broadly unsettled basic certainties of Victorian ideology and faith.4  The Blue Lias rock formations around Lyme were the ground zero of this upheaval. 

6 Henry De la Beche, Duria Antiquior, 1830.  Wikimedia Commons. 

The consequences, at once energizing and destabilizing, for imaginative writing in the mid-nineteenth century have been richly explored by scholars.  In the wake of scientific treatises such as Charles Lyell’s landmark Principles of Geology (1830–33), the visionary splendors of natural history could now seem to outdo romance or epic; as Jonathan Sachs puts it, geology, with its revelation of inconceivable expanses and depths of time, had now for many “replaced poetry as a source of the sublime” (Sachs 315).  One need look no further than Tennyson’s great elegy In Memoriam (1850), which amplifies the poem’s most immediate trauma, that of personal bereavement, with an alarming new sense of larger instabilities:  the mutability of land itself, with its slow, relentless, and endless fluctuations, and the impermanence of the species that inhabit it, notably those newly discovered “Dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime” (canto 56, ll. 22–23).  The poem expresses loss of existential security as much as the loss of a friend or lover.  In two of Tennyson’s most plangent stanzas, that most solid, enduring of things, the land underfoot, now becomes melting or fluid: 

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea. 

The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like louds they shape themselves and go.  (canto 123, ll. 5–12) 

Elsewhere, the shock is felt in the comic register of Bleak House (1852–53), with, as Dickens evokes his novel’s pervasive urban smog, a teasing juxtaposition of biblical phraseology and new scientific taxonomy:  “As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill” (11).  Victorian dinosaurs moved slowly, of course; this wasn’t Jurassic Park. 

Sometimes the consequences for religious faith come close to the surface, as in the celebrated case of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (composed c.1851, though not published until 1867), but the geology behind all this ideological anxiety and imaginative relish is perhaps most starkly visible in Thomas Hardy’s novel A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872–73), in which a grim, haggard “Cliff without a Name” presides with looming intensity over the action.  With the stonily fossilized molluscs that stare from its strata, the cliff stands as a desolate, vertiginous reminder of human insignificance, where “the immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of man” (203, 200).  At this literally cliffhanging point in Hardy’s novel, a recent critic writes, “disembodied Time becomes focalized momentarily in the embodied trilobite in the strata.  Herein lies the tension:  between the affective experience of registering deep time, and Hardy’s reality that inanimate Time is gazeless. . . . There is no benevolent gazer or teleological endpoint, only the presence of insentient Time, which seems to hover as a specter” (Dillion 441).  Within the episode lurks the prospect that the trilobite’s fate will be that of humanity itself, destined to future extinction. 

Austen might seem a less promising case for analysis in this vein, though not for any reason of interpretive anachronism, and not when we focus on her late masterpiece Persuasion, attuned as it is to what the heroine Anne Elliot calls “our own nothingness” (45).  As revisionist historians of deep time have emphasized, the existential apprehensions explored by critics of Victorian literature and culture—apprehensions especially, in Heringman’s words, about “the scalar incommensurability of geology and sacred history” (Deep Time 26)—start to be heard, indeed quite noisily voiced, within her own lifetime.  We may be fairly certain that Austen never encountered the term “Jurassic,” though it originated in the 1790s from fieldwork by the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt in the Jura mountains and was gaining currency with earth scientists around the time of her death (Ervin-Blankenheim 63).  Heringman points to the overarching importance of the Comte de Buffon’s Les Epoques de la Nature (1778; an abridgement appeared in English in 1780), where Buffon proposes an immense conjectural geohistory preceding humanity’s emergence in an Anthropocene-like seventh epoch:  a longue durée of unthinkable extent, characterized by primeval oceanic and geologic upheaval, and populated by long-extinct megafauna, annihilated now by climate change, unlike any modern species.  “How many revolutions have taken place beyond the reach of human memory!” Buffon exclaims, citing ammonites and other cliff-face finds as enabling us to glimpse “the profoundest depths of time” (qtd. in Heringman, Deep Time 89). 

Buffon was more theoretician than exponent, and indeed was attacked in his day as a purveyor of romance.  But in the 1780s, tough-minded fieldwork was being undertaken at Siccar Point and other sites within reach of Enlightenment Edinburgh by James Hutton, founder of modern geology, for whom the folding, tilting, and interpenetration of differently constituted strata could only result from the relentless churn of oceanic forces over immeasurable spans of time.  Publishing his discoveries and theories in 1788, Hutton provocatively described the natural history of the Earth as “a succession of worlds”:  a succession in which, when considering the vast extent of geological time, “we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end” (qtd. in Taylor 10).  Here was sublimity indeed, in the Burkean sense of generating overwhelming sensations of ineffable awe, and it came to public attention through the work of Hutton’s colleague and popularizer James Playfair, who published his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth in 1802.  As Playfair famously put it a few years later, recalling the Siccar Point expedition, “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time” (qtd. in Heringman, Deep Time 242). 

As Austen came to maturity as a writer, something of this giddiness enters the work of a novelist on whom she is often said to have drawn, Charlotte Smith, in her posthumous topographical poem Beachy Head (1807).5  Kevis Goodman describes Smith’s “geological poetics” as unfolded in this wide-ranging poem, and dwells on the sense of instability or “ferment” central to Beachy Head as Smith contemplates “the strange and foreign forms / Of sea shells” in the calciferous cliff-face: 

                                Does Nature then
Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes
Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling
To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world?
Or did this range of chalky mountains, once
Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves
Swell’d fathomless?  What time these fossil shells,
Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown
Among the imbedding calx:  when the huge hill
Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment
Grew up a guardian barrier, ’twixt the sea
And the green level of the sylvan weald.  (165–66) 

What could be the explanation:  wanton nature playing mind games with us; geologic instability as the hillside rises or falls?  Smith offers no sure answer to these questions, “since from whence / These fossil forms are seen, is but conjecture, / Food for vague theories, or vain dispute,” irrelevant to the survival of rural folk on the downs above.  Even so, Goodman finds in the poem a resource for meditation on other instabilities that preoccupy Smith’s work more broadly, not least the political turmoil of the revolutionary era as it plays out either side of the English Channel, a gulf understood now as the outcome of ancient, violent geological concussion.  Her exploration, writes Goodman, “involves her in a revisionary understanding of the nature in natural history as a part of an overall historical process that includes human history no less than any other, and not as an unchanging stratum above which social and political processes happen” (986). 

Duria antiquior 

7 Unknown artist, Mary Anning with her dog Tray (before 1842).  Natural History Museum, London, Wikimedia Commons.

Smith situates her poem on an imposing chalk headland in southeast England, but between Austen’s earliest attested visit to Lyme of November 1803—and November, of course, is the “black, dripping, and comfortless” season of the Persuasion interlude (133)—and her death in 1817, the real action was taking place on the Dorset coast.  Already Lyme was frequented by genteel fossil-collectors from Bath, Bristol, and London, whom Austen no doubt saw browsing for ammonites and belemnites on the beach; enterprising tradesmen were already developing sidelines targeted at wealthy visitors, offering showpieces for their cabinets of curiosities.  Foremost among these tradesmen was the furniture maker Richard Anning, he of the inflated lid valuation, who not only scoured the shoreline and quarried the cliffs for specimens but also used the skills of his trade to glam up finds into costly polished sections.  In 1805, a few months after Austen’s surviving letter from Lyme, the visiting Swiss geologist Jean-André Deluc reports that “at his house I saw some fin[e] cornua Ammonis, sawn through the middle, and various other marine fossils” (qtd. in Sharpe 31).  Anning died in 1810, his health destroyed by a clifftop fall two years earlier, but he was soon outdone by his teenaged children Joseph and especially Mary Anning, a brilliant autodidact who graduated from early years hawking ammonites—“she sells sea shells by the sea shore”—to become one of the key figures, though only now gaining due recognition, in the emergent science of palaeontology. 

In autumn 1811, just as Austen’s long-delayed publishing career at last took flight, Joseph sensationally discovered what we now know to have been a huge ichthyosaur skull, exposed on the beach by a shale collapse.  A year later, having hired a team of quarrymen to assist, Mary Anning was able to excavate and preserve the entire fossilized skeleton of this ichthyosaur, apex predator of the Liassic seas, fully 17 feet or 5 meters long.  By 1813, her astonishing find was drawing crowds to Bullock’s Museum, the so-called Egyptian Hall on London’s Piccadilly, and was scientifically described in a Linnaean Society paper of 1814, though the designation ichthyosaurus (fish-lizard) did not appear in print until a catalogue of 1817 by Charles König, Keeper of Natural History at the British Museum.  It was not applied to Anning’s specimen until 1820, after the Egyptian Hall’s contents were auctioned off and König pounced on behalf of his museum.  In the meantime, another scientist tried out the designation proteosaurus, from the god of oceanic mutability; before that, “crocodile” was the usual term, though employed in a spirit of puzzled approximation more than strict identification.6 

8 Ichthyosaurus inclosing Coprolite, from Plates of Dr. Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise (1836).  Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
(Click here to see a larger version.) 

Anning’s ichthyosaur was not only a matter of specialist interest, and news of it reached far beyond Linnaean Society scientists or the metropolitan patrons of Bullock’s Museum.  The find was rapidly reported in the national and provincial press, including wide-circulation London periodicals and the leading newspapers of Austen’s locale, notably the Bath Chronicle and the Winchester-based Hampshire Chronicle.7  As the Hampshire Chronicle reported on 16 November 1812 (note the passive voice—numerous notices like this appeared around the country, but never crediting Anning by name): 

A few days ago, immediately after the late high tide, there was discovered under the cliff between Lyme-Regis and Charmouth, the complete petrification of a crocodile, seventeen feet in length, in an imperfect state.  It was dug out of the cliffs nearly on a level with the sea, at the depth of one hundred feet below the summit of the cliff. 

Newspapers also registered a growing realization that this was no mere giant crocodile in the modern sense, as when the Bath Chronicle for 26 January 1815 summarized the first scientific analysis: 

Linnæan Society.—On Dec. 6^th, a paper by James Johnson, esq; was read, giving an account of some fossil bones found in the cliff near Lyme, Dorsetshire.  This cliff abounds in belemnites, nautili, and the remains of other sea animals.  The bones in question have been supposed to belong to a crocodile; but Mr. Johnson gave his reason for considering that opinion as ill founded.  He thinks they constitute the bones of a new and unknown species of amphibious animal.  He is of opinion, that the animals whose remains are found here, lived and died upon the spot.

Clearly, there was still much to be figured out, and as new specimens came out of the Blue Lias rocks over the next few years, other collectors and geologists were drawn to Lyme and in some cases started working closely with Anning.  The most influential at first was Henry De la Beche, a wealthy young member of the newly founded Geological Society, who moved to Lyme in 1812, excavated specimens alongside Anning, and purchased others from her.  De la Beche focused his collection on ichthyosaurs, and by 1819 could demonstrate the presence in local rocks of three distinct ichthyosaur species; he could also see the funny side, and in 1830 produced a drawing (circulating in lithograph, and sometimes thought to satirize either William Buckland or Charles Lyell) in which “Professor Ichthyosaurus” delivers a lecture about fossilized human remains, noting how badly equipped for survival humans seem to have been. 

9 Henry De la Beche, Awful Changes (1830).  Wellcome Collection 296i, Public Domain Mark.
(Click here to see a larger version.)

More important in the long run was locally born William Buckland, who as an Oxford undergraduate returned regularly to Lyme during the period of Austen’s visits and became Oxford’s inaugural Reader in Geology in 1818.  Over his lifetime, Buckland achieved numerous advances in palaeontological understanding, including the first published description of a dinosaur fossil, that Oxfordshire megalosaurus that was to get a walk-on part in Bleak House.  Then there was a local clergyman named William Daniel Conybeare, who in 1813 passed up the opportunity to become Oxford’s Reader in Mineralogy but collaborated with De la Beche on palaeontological reports and in 1822 published an influential stratigraphy manual, Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales.  There were also important women residents and visitors who, unlike Anning, were of Austen’s social rank, notably the three Philpot sisters, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth, who moved to Lyme in 1805; Elizabeth built up large, meticulously documented fossil collections, and served as a key intermediary between Anning and the scientific establishment of Oxford and London.8 

10 Nathaniel Whittock, The Geological Lecture Room, Oxford (1823).  Wellcome Collection 544983i, Public Domain Mark.
(Click here to see a larger version.) 

Throughout his distinguished career, Buckland worked doggedly, if with limited success, to reconcile his scientific discoveries with the biblical record.  Confronted by a range of biological, palaeontological, and geological evidence including, most obviously, fossils bearing little resemblance to any animal still in existence, other natural historians such as the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his adversary the anatomist Georges Cuvier were already grappling with concepts of evolution and extinction.  Yet ongoing advances in geology and palaeontology made aspects of their theories (the transformism of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique [1809]; the catastrophism that Cuvier developed to reconcile the fossil record with Noah’s Flood) increasingly inadequate as explanations.  Building on Hutton’s notion of unimaginably vast, indeed infinite, geological time with “no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end,” Lyell was already researching and giving papers during the 1820s, preliminary to his great Principles of Geology, contending that geologically recent or modern causes could not explain material traces of remote past times now being discovered and analyzed.  Austen of course was not alive to read Lyell’s Principles, though it’s worth noting that a copy was promptly acquired by her brother Edward Knight, whose extensive library at Godmersham Park was the largest and best-stocked collection to which she had access.9 

In modern literature, writers revisiting the scene of Anning’s discoveries have been alert to their challenging implications.  In The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a novel haunted by Persuasion and In Memoriam as well as Buffon and Darwin, Fowles’s troubled protagonist Charles Smithson epitomizes the impact of the findings systematized by Lyell, whose work “blew like a great wind, freezing to the timid, but invigorating to the bold, through the century’s stale metaphysical corridors” (157).  Among recent novels based on Anning’s career, the best is Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009), which gives the role of narrator to Elizabeth Philpot, and has her younger sister Margaret recall meeting Austen “long ago at the Assembly Rooms the first time we visited Lyme.”  In one scene, Elizabeth brings an ammonite to church, feeling “sucked into its spiral, farther and farther back in time, until the past was lost in the center.”  Then she worries aloud about extinction.  And if 6,000 years ago, as in the Book of Genesis with Bishop Ussher’s chronological gloss, God created rocks and hills before creating the animals, how is it that fossilized animals were now being found so deep in the middle of rocks?  “God placed the fossils there when He created the rocks, to test our faith,” the vicar serenely replies (Chevalier 178, 89, 92–93).  Both novels make evocative use of Lyme as a site of incongruous wilderness, almost a portal into deep time, where modernity starts to seem fragile or a mere veneer.  For Chevalier, Lyme “is a town that has submitted to its geography rather than forced the land to submit to it”; the town “wriggles this way and that, as if trying to escape the hills and sea, and failing” (12).  In Fowles, dwarfed by the dramatic feature known as the Undercliff at Pinhay west of Lyme, with its vast grove of ivied ashes, its exotic colonies of ancient ferns, and its erupting beds of flint, Charles experiences “inexplicable intuitions, perhaps the last remnant of some faculty from our palaeolithic past” (136).  Then of course there’s the evocative cinematography of Francis Lee’s Ammonite (2020), a haunting movie of bleak shorelines and granite seas that retrofits the later Anning with a female lover, Charlotte, Lady Murchison, an elite, well-connected fossilist known to have befriended her in the 1820s. 

What about novelists of Austen’s own day?  Intriguingly, one of them might have been Austen’s niece Anna, who in the summer of 1814 ran past her aunt a draft novel tentatively entitled “Which Is the Heroine?”—so eliciting from Austen some of her most sustained surviving remarks on the practice of fiction, including her much-quoted, if somewhat misleading, comment that “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on” (9–18 September 1814).  Like Persuasion two years later, Anna’s manuscript seems to have featured an excursion to Lyme, but Austen forbids the plan on grounds of verisimilitude:  “Lyme will not do.  Lyme is towards 40 miles distance from Dawlish & would not be talked of there” (10–18 August 1814). 

That leaves us with a clutch of somewhat uninspiring Romantic-era novels containing Lyme episodes, whose authors, sometimes knowing the place first-hand, sometimes evidently not, dimly sense Lyme’s potential as a setting—in particular, its possibilities for erotic encounter and sublime experience—but fail to exploit these possibilities with even a shred of Austen’s virtuosity.  Some describe Lyme’s burgeoning leisure culture (the assembly rooms, the balls, the theatrical performances; the invigorating pleasures of sea-air walks on the beach or the Cobb), and of these, the most competent look to the place for emotional heightening.  In Jane Harvey’s Anything But What You Expect (1819)—a novel that in fact contains nothing you wouldn’t expect—the heroine goes to Lyme in search of a runaway husband and attracts unwelcome ogling somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Elliot:  “for more than one of the gay young men of the town had already caught a glimpse of her lively face, and the spirit of curiosity was up in arms to discover all the items that belonged to her” (3: 23–24).  Prudently, the object of their attentions beats a retreat.  In Rebecca, A Novel (1799), a Minerva Press production by Mrs. E. M. Foster (that’s E. M. Foster, unfortunately, not E. M. Forster), the heroine meets her future husband among the “genteel company” to be found promenading on the beach, where “the gaze of well-bred people” makes her self-conscious (2: 105).  In Catherine Cuthbertson’s Santo Sebastiano, or The Young Pretender, an 1806 novel in five volumes and an eyewatering 2,116 pages, things briefly look up in volume 3 when the heroine and her friend “sallied out soon after breakfast; and, on their way to the cobbe, they were joined by Major Mandeville.”  But then Major Mandeville, his promisingly villainous name notwithstanding, turns out to be the perfect gentleman (5: 127). 

A few further novels attempt limited forays into sublime description, sometimes to amplify the mood of a character, like that of the hero in Samuel William Ryley’s The Itinerant, or Memoirs of an Actor (1808–09), who experiences “a fit of melancholy despondency . . . attended with a degree of horror so painful, that I sat on the beach, listening to the rolling surge” (2: 193).  The surge rolls on in Rebecca Edridge’s The Scrinium (1822), where the narrator is overawed by “the expanse of the wide extending ocean,” and astonished in particular by the Cobb as “proof of the inventive ingenuity of man”; in words Louisa Musgrove would have done well to heed, “I cannot say much in praise of the footing; it is however delightful to stand at the extremity, and contemplate the roaring waves” (2: 73).  The most successful exercise in this vein comes in Elizabeth Isabella Spence’s The Curate and His Daughter, A Cornish Tale (1813), where the heroine notes a distinctive intermingling of sky, sea, and earth as she climbs the path up from Charmouth: 

There, madam, is the ocean.  Only look what a sublime picture it makes in the scene—the bold cliffs projecting along its margin—the blue expanse of sea fading in the distant horizon—the softer scenery of the green hills which surrounds this lovely spot, with the beautiful tranquillity of the evening, are surely enough to make one in love with the country.  (2: 96) 

And there we have it:  enough to make one love the country perhaps, but only the most shallow exploitation of the poetics of place or significant “local attachment” that Fiona Stafford and other scholars have now made central to Romantic-period literary studies.10 

Poems evoking Lyme are no more distinguished, and although Wordsworth lived a short distance inland for two years in the 1790s, and walked there several times, he doesn’t handle the place explicitly in his poetry.  There is, however, a fascinating though little-known set of verse epistles dated autumn 1818, anonymous and possibly collaborative, which survived locally in what seems to have been a professionally produced manuscript copy until publication was initiated by Fowles (and eventually achieved in his memory) early in the present century.  Entitled The Lymiad, the poem is cast in the satirical tradition of Richard Anstey’s The New Bath Guide (1766) and William Combe’s The Tour of Dr Syntax (1812), but the varying verse forms and thematic emphases of its eight epistles extend its range beyond mock heroic into different and more serious kinds of evocation, from romantic landscape to politics past and present.  Historical time dominates The Lymiad’s Letters 3 and 4, which recall the building of the Cobb, narrate the Civil War siege, and deplore the Bloody Assizes.  Geological time is to the fore in Letter 7, which surveys the Pinhay Undercliff in sublime mode, emphasizing the ancient and exotic: 

Delightful Pinny, ’mid thy sheltering rocks,
Which long have stood Time’s all-subduing power,
Bidding defiance to those awful shocks
Which must at length the firmest base o’erpower,
How sweet to rove at noon-tide’s radiant hour!
’Tis then I love to seek thy tranquil shade,
Where elms luxuriant form a leafy bower,
And calm reclining in some verdant glade,
Trace thy fantastic forms, which high o’er ocean tower.  (123, ll. 1349–57) 

Not deathless verse perhaps, but a good deal better than Sir Edward Denham’s mangled attempt at the oceanic sublime in chapter 7 of Sanditon, and interesting to read alongside Persuasion’s almost contemporaneous evocation of the Undercliff.  In The Lymiad, the scene is populated by visitors who shine in the dignity of FGS (Fellows of the Geological Society) and are there to worship the genius of the place, the ammonite-crowned goddess Lymia, who “o’er the treasures of the deep preside[s]” (73, l. 67).  Then there are the resident natural historians, notably Von Cranio, a pompous intellectual (“With deep research, and looks intent, / He probes each skull’s peculiar bent”), and languid Sir Fopling Fossil, who, a note explains, has now renounced philandering for palaeontology:  “Talk of anything besides an Ichthyosaurus . . .  and the youthful geologist will take a comfortable nap in his chaise-longue” (83, ll. 325–26; 84 n.).  Early addenda to the manuscript identify Von Cranio as George Holland, who published meteorological studies of Dorset in the 1820s; Sir Fopling Fossil is of course Henry De la Beche.  Neither Mary Anning nor Elizabeth Philpot gets a mention before the narrator quits the scene in Letter 8, bearing, she tells her addressee, “Fossils, and curious fishes’ bones / To grace your Cabinet, and stones / To place beside them if you chuse” (141, ll. 1803–05). 

The first partial falling of the cliff 

There are no fossils in Persuasion, unless you count Austen’s derision, in this her most meritocratic and future-oriented novel, of those blue-blooded relics of a bygone era, preening Sir Walter Elliot with his cherished Debrett, or the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple and her daughter the Honourable Miss Carteret, who already seem all but extinct, stranded by the ebbing tide of feudal privilege:  “they were nothing,” Austen frankly writes (162).  Nor, alas, are there any dinosaurs in Persuasion, unless you count reptilian Mr. Elliot, the predatory heir presumptive of Kellynch Hall, “‘a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who . . . would be guilty of any cruelty,’” Anne Elliot is warned; he contrasts in this respect with the “warm and amiable heart” of Captain Wentworth, as does Sir Walter himself, with his enervated “baronet-blood” (215, 98, 7). 

While writers on social structure at the time were starting to reach for geological metaphors—the Oxford English Dictionary quotes Washington Irving in 1819 on “the various strata of society”—Austen nowhere explicitly makes that figurative leap, for all the meticulous attention throughout her work to rank, class, or what we now call social stratification.  She simply inspired later readers to think in these terms.  Mary Lascelles, in her classic study of 1939, notes Austen’s satirical attention to the “fossilized phraseology” of polite conversation (114).  In an influential essay of 1954, Joseph M. Duffy finds Persuasion “heavily weighted on the side of the eager, liberal naval class against the fossilized aristocracy” (the warm-blooded, we might say, versus the cold),11 while Tony Tanner, in his dazzling 1986 reading of Pride and Prejudice, explores Austen’s interest in the “restrictions, boundaries and chasms” of “a clearly stratified class society” (Duffy 287; Tanner 128).  More recently, Thomas Dabbs sees Emma as anatomizing, in the social hierarchy of Highbury, “soon-to-be fossilized elements of English culture,” while Kelly M. McDonald finds “a fossilization of Hartfield” in the same novel (Dabbs 91; McDonald 30).  Emma is also the focus for David Aers’s claim that Austen “accepts the imperatives of social stratification and supports Mr. Knightley’s anachronistic view of society as a static neo-feudal order” (125)—though even here, it should be added, Austen is preoccupied by mismatches between moral and social standing, between worth and birth (think of the farmer Robert Martin, in some ways Emma’s moral touchstone), and in Persuasion the interplay between low-born naval officers and decadent minor aristocracy shows the stratification conspicuously start to fold, tilt, even fissure.  It’s not simply that inherited honors don’t necessarily coincide with honorable qualities.  True nobility now lies entirely elsewhere, and titles look like empty relics from a bygone age.  Mr. Elliot, stuck for a better justification of inherited hierarchies, can still blandly insist that “‘rank is rank’” (163).  But little more can be said for a system that calcifies the social order in obsolescent structures from antiquity, just at the moment, Persuasion insists, when dynamism and renewal are most urgently needed. 

11 Autograph letter with plesiosaurus sketch by Mary Anning (1823).  Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons CC-BY (1).
(Click here to see a larger version.)

Perhaps the most exuberant use of fossil language comes from Peter W. Graham, whose reading of Austen as a proto-Darwinian novelist turns mainly on matters of evolutionary psychology but also includes the first serious attempt to consider the implications for Persuasion of Lyme as a setting.  For Graham, it’s a place that prepares Austen’s heroine “to turn her back on those dying dinosaurs among whom she’s lived, the landed Elliots, and to cast her lot with the ascendant meritocracy of the British navy, the captains whose ships rule the waves where plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs once swam.”12  One wonders if Darwin himself thought something similar.  In one of many references to Austen in his letters and notebooks, Darwin tells his sister Caroline in 1833 that he knew Persuasion so well that he didn’t need to have a copy with him on the Beagle:  “I will not take Persuasion, as the Captain says he will not read it, & there is no danger of my forgetting it.”  As for the admirable captain in question, Robert FitzRoy, he was known in the Darwin family as “a Captain Wentworth.”13  

Austen may not have planned Persuasion with quite the programmatic neatness suggested by Graham’s delightful formulation, and if she connected the crumbling strata and ancient monsters of Lyme with the rank-based petrification of the inherited social order, it’s a connection she leaves for the reader to complete.  There’s no question, however, that for the pivotal chapters of Persuasion she’s alert to—indeed, she pointedly selects—Lyme as an environment in stark contrast with stagnant Kellynch Hall at the start of the novel or Bath with its urban glare towards the end.  “The young people were all wild to see Lyme,” Austen writes as they set off, and wilderness is just what they find—wilderness that seems to engulf the town, “the principal street almost hurrying into the water,” and the built environment itself, specifically the Cobb, a matter of “old wonders” (101, 102).  In a rare set piece of landscape description, Austen surveys the shoreline to east and west and, as she reaches the extraordinary Pinhay Undercliff, practices rather than (as in the gothic pastiche of Northanger Abbey or Sir Edward Denham’s overblown Sanditon seascape) parodying the discourse of the sublime: 

The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation;—the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme, and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight.  (103) 

12 The Landslip near Lyme Regis Looking East (c. 1840).  West Dorset District Council/Dorset Coast Digital Archive. 

This was not Austen’s natural mode, and it’s a remarkable passage, with its chiaroscuro effects of light and shade:  sweetness and cheerfulness, to be sure, but more emphatically darkness (the cliffs), fragmentation (the rocks), instability (the tides), chasms that generate verdant growth, even in November, but at the same time evoke generations of the dead.  It’s a place of ancient mystery and preternatural depth, and its ambience colours the critical episodes to come.  What relics of a deeper past one might find among the fissured rocks, or where one’s tideline contemplations might lead, is left unsaid amidst a generalized sense of wonder.  But there’s no mistaking the impression of profound otherness that Austen injects into this striking interlude, or the ominous character of its backdrop—dark cliffs, falling cliffs, so heralding the fall that follows in this novel of multiple instabilities:  the fall of Louisa as she leaps from the Cobb to be concussed on its quarried rock.  Which is not an extinction event, as things turn out, though Louisa’s pallid, horrified, despairing companions take it at first for just such a thing:  “‘She is dead! she is dead!’” (118). 

It’s not the critical fashion these days to talk much about Austen’s symbolism, but in fact she looks to mineral, indeed fossil, forms to evoke the situation of her characters in at least two earlier novels.  In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price’s “pretty amber cross” (295) shows her using an ornament fashioned from fossilized material, Jill Heydt-Stevenson writes, “in order to expose the subterranean layers beneath a complex courtship scene.”14  Pride and Prejudice has the “‘petrified spars’” that Elizabeth Bennet expects to gather in the Derbyshire peaks (265), which Margaret Anne Doody calls “an unconsciously chosen image of what Darcy’s love for her (so she fears) will have become” (174).15  A comparable sense of Lyme’s dark, disintegrating cliffs as expressing larger fragilities and perils is entirely in keeping with Persuasion’s intensive, almost Tennysonian, use of what the Victorians would come to call pathetic fallacy, where outward environment expresses inner mood—or as Anne Elliot muses amidst the “tawny leaves and withered hedges” of an autumn walk, “the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness” (90, 91).  Graham sums up the pattern:  “Lyme Regis as rendered by Austen offers a remarkable fit between place and feeling, nature and human nature, geology and sociology” (Jane Austen and Charles Darwin 179). 

More specifically, Lyme’s rockfalls offer, in a culture transformed by decades of war (Austen notes “the unfeudal tone of the present day” [150]), an arresting metaphor for social change.  It can sometimes seem as though everything is falling in Persuasion:  Sir Walter, of course, as he squanders his cash and is forced to let his ancestral estate “fall into” new hands (38); Sir Walter’s little nephew, who alarms everyone in the “bad fall” that breaks his collarbone (57); the massive 1775 landslip to which Austen alludes (“the first partial falling of the cliff”) in her depiction of the Undercliff (103); flighty Louisa’s precipitate fall from the Cobb; the Camden Place lodgings rented by Sir Walter in Bath, so notorious for subsidence that a grand new crescent begun in 1788 had been abandoned; even the “sinking heart” with which Anne enters Camden Place (148).16  Or even, Clara Tuite notes, “a hauntingly ambiguous ‘fall into a quotation’” that comes as Anne converses awkwardly with Wentworth in the run-up to the Lyme expedition (P 91; Tuite 73).  (“Why a fall?” Tuite asks.)  Yet of course other characters, paragons of another social stratum, are markedly on the rise.  When Sir Walter, a spokesman for rank-based immobility and social petrification, disparages the navy for “‘bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of,’” he unwittingly catches the dynamic of the novel, which is all on the side of the self-made rising men—“active, zealous”—to whom Austen looks in the closing words of the novel to shape a new order in the nation (21, 186).  Earlier, as Anne starts to imagine the stately rooms of Kellynch inhabited by the low-born Crofts (“Oh, how fallen in their destination!  How unworthily occupied!  An ancient family to be so driven away! Strangers filling their place!”), she then, in one of the novel’s most salient passages, abruptly changes her tune:  “she could not but in conscience feel that they were gone who deserved not to stay, and that Kellynch-hall had passed into better hands than its owners’” (136). 

Here is the great recognition embraced by Austen’s Persuasion at the close of her career:  that the social strata she anatomizes so closely in earlier novels were now irrevocably starting to buckle and crack; they suffer folding and upheaval from the massive energies released by the Napoleonic wars and especially its naval triumphs; a downwardly mobile baronet relinquishes his estate; an upwardly mobile sailor restores it to life.  How controlled or intentional are the resonances with stratigraphy here is open to question, but the fundamental affinity is not:  the affinity between Austen’s interest in human phenomena of various kinds—cold-bloodedness and predation; the unstable stratifications of rank and class; social or dynastic survival or extinction—and the geological and palaeontological revolution that was now beginning to open up a rich new figurative repertoire for novelists and poets. 

For Gillen D’Arcy Wood in his study of the climatically devastating eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, and its far-reaching global consequences (failed harvests, famines, social unrest), Persuasion shares with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the character of a Tambora novel:  “That same wet summer in nearby Hampshire, Jane Austen, housebound and ailing, was writing her late masterpiece, Persuasion, in which the melancholy heroine must reconcile herself to a Tambora-style future with no ‘second spring’” (Wood 242).  But in the end, of course, Anne Elliot doesn’t reconcile herself to that future; she resists it, and joyously defeats it.  In one of Austen’s trademark narrative reversals, she’s rejuvenated by the bracing air of primordial Lyme; she famously retrieves her glow, her erotic “bloom,” her “animation of eye” (112).  Freed from suffocating Kellynch, and readying herself for cut-throat Bath, she transforms herself in ways that also transform her lost, but now retrieved, suitor Captain Wentworth, who at last confirms the expedition to Lyme as the novel’s very pivot:  “only at Uppercross had he learnt to do her justice, and only at Lyme had he begun to understand himself” (262). 

What, finally, did Austen understand at Lyme, amid its glorious soaring cliffs and its tawdry fossil shops?  It’s hard to say, writing as Austen did on the very cusp of a revolution in geological and palaeontological understanding, to what extent the Jurassic setting of Persuasion, with its crumbling strata and obsolete life forms, was a conscious or more intuitive choice for a novel about disintegrating social structures and the obsolescence of ancient rank.  The affinity between environment and theme is clear; the shaping deliberacy, not so much.  At a conscious level, for sure, Persuasion is not yet In Memoriam or A Pair of Blue Eyes, with their anxious reach into deep time to contextualize and destabilize the present; but it represents a move in that direction.  Which might make us all the more ready to wonder, as Virginia Woolf does in her famous speculative essay “Jane Austen at Sixty,” what in Austen’s creative development might have followed Persuasion, which for Woolf is the work of a writer wearying of her established mode and casting around for a new one; a writer, too, who would soon have become a literary celebrity, dining in London with the cultural and intellectual elite, and carrying new knowledge back to her rural cottage to write with.  “And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write?” Woolf asks:  those novels of the 1820s and 1830s foreclosed by her death in her early forties.  For one thing, “she would have known more,” Woolf writes, and with that knowledge, “her sense of security would have been shaken.”  For another, “she would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but (if we may be pardoned the vagueness of the expression) what life is” (283).  What life is, Woolf says.  And perhaps also what it was long ago, and what that past life, newly conjured from the eroding cliffs, might have to say to the present. 

13 W. D. Conybeare, Restoration of the Plesiosaurus Dolichodeirus and Ichthyosaurus Communis, from Transactions of the Geological Society of London (1824).  Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
(Click here to see a larger version.)

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I’m grateful to the organizers of the JASNA 2024 Annual General Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, for inviting me to write and deliver this lecture.  Warm thanks to my undergraduate research assistant Carter Vis and my doctoral student Dana Lew for their invaluable work; also to my University of Toronto colleagues Alex Hernandez, Terry Robinson, and Tom Hurka for their generous encouragement and advice.

NOTES

1This late Turner seascape was acquired by the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1940 (gift of Emilie L. Heine in memory of Mr. and Mrs. John Hauck); earlier Lyme drawings from Turner’s “Corfe to Dartmouth” sketchbook of 1811 are in the Tate Gallery, London: see https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/tour-of-the-west-country-r1136818. 

2For the evidence of location, see Southam 128; Austen’s niece Anna Lefroy called this “a sketch which Aunt Cassandra made of her in one of their expeditions” (qtd. in Lane 55). 

3H. Tennyson 2: 47.  Francis Turner Palgrave spent part of each year in Lyme and wrote bad poems there; the quoted phrase is untraced, though it may be a paraphrase from William Gilpin.  In his own account of Tennyson’s visit, Palgrave was struck that the characters in Persuasion “were more real and living to him than Monmouth and his followers, whose landing-place on the western side of the Cobb we had just passed” (Lane 35, quoting Palgrave’s essay “Miss Austen at Lyme” from The Grove, a miscellany of 1891). 

4See Taylor on Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (225–27); “impossible monsters” is Kingsley’s phrase of 1863.

 5On Smith and Austen (though with little reference to Smith as poet), see Labbe. 

6Sharpe 34–40; on the present whereabouts of Anning’s finds, see 164–72.  For earlier attempts to make sense of fossil “crocodiles,” and the surrounding satire, see Risling 321–39. 

7On the latter journal and the case for Austen’s access to it, see Franta. 

8On these various fossilists, see Goudie and Brunsden (chs. 3 and 4); for their interactions with Anning, see Sharpe (42–53).  Elizabeth Philpot’s remarkable sketches of Mary Anning’s ichthyosaur may be viewed on the Oxford University Museum of Natural History website: https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-mary-annings-ichthyosaur#listing_524386_0. 

9For Austen’s use of the Godmersham library, with a searchable catalogue, see Peter Sabor’s “Reading with Austen” website. 

10See Stafford, and, for the “blue humanities” equivalent, Allen, Groom, and Smith, eds. 

11See also Olivia Murphy’s more sustained development of this idea in her thoughtful recent reading of Persuasion (162–63). 

12Graham, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin 179; see also the earlier version of this argument in Graham’s “Why Lyme Regis?” 

13For Darwin as a reader of Persuasion, see Murphy (154–55); also Tulenko.  Graham notes the pilgrimage undertaken by Darwin’s son Francis, who was on the Cobb to locate what he called “the classic spot” of Louisa’s fall when “I quite suddenly and inexplicably fell down.  The same thing happened to a friend on the same spot, and we concluded that in the surprisingly slippery character of the surface lies the explanation of the accident.  It had never seemed comprehensible that an active and capable man should miss so easy a catch as that provided by Louisa.  But if Captain Wentworth slipped and fell as she jumped, she would have come down with him” (qtd. in Graham, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin 174). 

14Heydt-Stevenson 145. “Given that amber is a fossil, questions arise as to Austen’s thoughts about the geological debates that fossils were inspiring in the early nineteenth century, debates that had serious religious ramifications,” Heydt-Stevenson adds (224); see also the close reading of this episode in Duquette 146–64. 

15On the petrified spars, see also the thoughtful reading of Pride and Prejudice in Heringman, Romantic Rocks (237–41). 

16For the Undercliff landslips, see Allison 201–13; for the Camden Crescent subsidence, see the note by Janet Todd and Antje Blank in the Cambridge Persuasion (369).