Jane Austen’s novels evoke an elegant, pre-industrial world of snug parsonages, prosperous farms and country mansions. Her genteel characters stroll through a landscape of untroubled husbandry and tamed nature. They sit in shrubberies surrounded by cultivated parks and gardens, by planned ‘wildernesses’ and picturesquely nurtured woodland. Austenland is England before steam power, before technological modernity, before consumer demands forced wholesale extraction from the earth, and communities were fragmented by mechanisation and fast travel. Along with their cinematic spinoffs and their nostalgic tinted landscapes, the novels have become a refuge from powerlessness and unease in the real overcrowded, over-trafficked environment most of us inhabit. They soothe us dwellers in the post-industrial Anthropocene.