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Austen and Darwin converged on the question of beauty

Charles Darwin was as fascinated by extravagant ornament in nature as Jane Austen was in culture. Did their explanations agree?

Two years earlier, when he first began the journey as a fresh university graduate, he told his sister Caroline: ‘I will not take Persuasion, as the Captain says he will not read it, & there is no danger of my forgetting it.’ His correspondence is dotted with Austen references in a way that conveys a genuine fluency with her work. Austen’s ‘clear, cold eye’ directed ‘at the concrete particulars of the world’ situates her alongside philosophical empiricists who rejected the existence of anything that couldn’t be verified through sense data, ie, non-material things like God, mind/consciousness, Platonist universals, transcendent moral law, etc. For instance, one can adorn oneself with superfluous ornaments that limit your capacity even to move and act as one ordinarily would, such as Mrs Allen’s dress: ‘But I think we had better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd!’ Splashing mud on Elizabeth’s muslin skirt in Pride and Prejudice(so indulgently portrayed in countless film adaptations) becomes a visuallyevocative way of contrasting her true free nature with an artificially imposed and constricting one.

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