Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/24

 a distinctive characteristic of the county. Jane Austen betrayed her Hampshire origin when she made Anne Elliot in Persuasion overhear Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove "in the hedge-row behind her, as if making their way down the rough, wild sort of channel down the centre."

The "hedge" at Steventon was called "the Church Walk," and another of the same kind began at the corner of the turf terrace, and was formed farther on into a rustic shrubbery with seats here and there, called "the Wood Walk"; just the right place for Mr. Woodhouse to have taken his three turns in, or for Lady Bertram "to get out into in bad weather!" Steventon church, as Jane Austen knew it, was small and plain, with no greater merits than good proportions, early English windows, and seven centuries of age; but since then it has been almost rebuilt, and is now a far more imposing edifice. The Church Walk led also to a fine old Manor House of the time of Henry VIII., to the grounds of which the Austens had always free access: the rest of Steventon was simply a group of cottages with good gardens attached to them.

It is easy to see that scenery and surroundings of this kind would not lend themselves to interesting description in writing; nobody but George Sand could have thrown a poetic halo round Steventon, and, therefore, Jane Austen, with her usual excellent common sense, avoided all direct mention of it. Nevertheless, just as the Brontë writings breathe Yorkshire in every line, so that it is almost like walking over the moors to read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, so it is unmistakable throughout her works that Steventon, under one form or another, was the background on which Jane Austen painted her "little bits of ivory