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Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

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Jane Austen (1775-1817)<br />

Chapter 16 -- <strong>Underground</strong> <strong>Rivers</strong> in English Fiction<br />

In Frederic & Elfrida (c. 1792), the teenage Austen is exuberant in the<br />

sentimental conventions <strong>of</strong> her day.<br />

On her return to Crankhumdunberry (<strong>of</strong> which sweet village her father was<br />

Rector), Charlotte was received with the greatest Joy by Frederic & Elfrida,<br />

who, after pressing her alternately to their Bosoms, proposed to her to take<br />

a walk in a Grove <strong>of</strong> Poplars which led from the Parsonage to a verdant<br />

Lawn enamelled with a variety <strong>of</strong> variegated flowers & watered by a purling<br />

Stream, brought from the Valley <strong>of</strong> Tempé by a passage under ground.<br />

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)<br />

And for the morbid, consder Hawthorne's chapter "On the Edge <strong>of</strong> a<br />

Precipice," The Marble Faun (1860),<br />

"Doubtless, too," resumed the sculptor (for his imagination was greatly excited by the idea <strong>of</strong><br />

this wondrous chasm), "all the blood that the Romans shed, whether on battlefields, or in the<br />

Coliseum, or on the cross, -- in whatever public or private murder, -- ran into this fatal gulf, and<br />

formed a mighty subterranean lake <strong>of</strong> gore, right beneath our feet. The blood from the thirty<br />

wounds in Caesar's breast flowed hitherward, and that pure little rivulet from Virginia's bosom,<br />

too! Virginia, beyond all question, was stabbed by her father, precisely where we are standing."<br />

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)<br />

One the greatest and surely the unhappiest <strong>of</strong> American authors, Poe married his 13-year-old<br />

cousin Virginia and strove to publish his writings. But as his works gained notice -- Poe was the<br />

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