There can be no doubt that Jane Austen was influenced in many ways by the writings of Elizabeth Craven, the Georgian feminist writer who was her predecessor.
In my book Elizabeth Craven: Writer, Feminist and European, I have already pointed out the resemblance between a famous scene in Mansfield Park, and a passage in Craven's book Letters to Her Son. On the topic of marriage, Craven writes that women have the same instinctive urge to be free that men have, and whenever she has found herself in a confined garden, with a barrier all around it, her imagination has started to run on ways of crossing the barrier and escaping.
I never walked in a shrubbery surrounded by a sunk fence, that I did not imagine I had half a dozen good reasons for wishing to cross the fence in half a dozen different places. Believe me, my dear son, there are many wives who would, at the hazard of their necks, leap the many sunk fences husbands place round their free-will. (1)
It is a stimulating metaphor, and s…
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