Come into the garden – Jane

Here’s a new and refreshing take on Jane Austen which links literature to landscape. The Avon Gardens Trust has organised a lecture this coming Saturday at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution.

 ‘Verdure is the most Perfect Refreshment’ – Jane Austen & the English Landscape Garden with Dr. Laura Mayer starts at 2.30 and is priced at £10 with booking through Eventbrite following the link.

Landscape – whether real or imagined – nature, & her characters’ response to these inform each & every one of Jane Austen’s novels. Justly famous for her sharp social satire, Austen was also highly attuned to the shifting sensibilities surrounding landscape gardening, which had been gathering pace since the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Laura looks at the Bath connection to Austen and discusses the various gardens mentioned, whilst exploring Gilpin’s theories on the Gothic/ Picturesque, the fashion for garden visiting and the connections between Mansfield Park & Humphry Repton.

Laura Mayer is an independent lecturer, writer and researcher, with an MA in Garden History and a PhD in eighteenth-century patronage from the University of Bristol.

She has published extensively, particularly on Lancelot Capability Brown, and Jane Austen’s contemporary, Humphry Repton.

Laura shares Elizabeth Bennett’s appreciation of Gilpin’s picturesque as well as her talent for tramping about a garden inappropriately shod. She has also been known to pen the odd limerick about Fitzwilliam Darcy.