Journal Article

Jane Austen and the Jurassic

Keymer, Tom

2024

Overview

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. 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 [ Image Omitted ] 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. 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. The family’s lodgings are adequate but inconvenient and none too clean, and some of the furniture needs repair: “I have written to Mr 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.”

• Publisher: Jane Austen Society of North America
• Subject: Art galleries & museums / Austen, Jane (1775-1817) / Fiction / Novels / Romances / Romantic period