The cover of this book shows the steps at Lyme down which Louisa Musgrove fell that fateful November day. It's a picture of a space, not of a body. And Jane Austen's novels, I will admit, seem among the least likely texts on which to found a discussion of the body. Isn't the body – absent, suspended, at best relegated to the inferior partner in the dyad of mind and body, as all agree is its position in our culture – virtually banished from her work? However we categorise them – as comedies of manners, or narratives of moral sensibility, of domestic politics, of the developing ethical consciousness, of heroines educated out of illusion, of the anxieties of choice, the subtleties of self-deception – these are novels whose titles, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, firmly ensconce them within an august and dominant tradition of moral adjudication, and by ‘moral’ here we must mean transcending the natural and the immanent. These are novels of a polite society too, in which obvious restraints are put upon the discussion of bodily matters, and the latitude of bodily expression allowed men and women, but especially women, is severely curtailed. ‘Even the Maid’ who was dressing Mrs Thrale's hair in 1782, ‘burst out o’ laughing at the Idea of a Lady saying her stomach ach ‘d’ and the lady-like decorum of the age of sensibility is one which this author scarcely seems to infringe or question.

Such at least may explain the reactions of Jane Austen's most notorious detractors, several of whom seem to have focused upon just this absence of the bodily in her writing.