| Summary: | There is only one direct reference to William Wordsworth in all Jane
Austen’s writing. This essay asks why it might be there and what it might
mean, weighing up the evidence—stylistic, thematic, journalistic,
biographical, naval, and historical—for and against Austen’s possible
knowledge of Lyrical Ballads and its author. Their shared ground is
discovered in habits of allusion and quotation; in the treatment of
memory, forgetting, suffering, damage, and loss; in a commitment to
noticing and praising the habitually overlooked; and in transformations of
the natural world into a possession of the mind and heart. Mansfield
Park, it is argued, proves the most Wordsworthian of Austen’s books.
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