Another one of Lyme's defining features is the region known as the Undercliff. An undercliff is a landslip near a costal area that leads to interesting geologic formations as well as unique vegetation (Wikipedia). Although Austen mentions Lyme's Undercliff in passing, this region of Lyme becomes an important location in Fowles' "The French Lieutenant's Woman".
Read the descriptions of the Undercliff from "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "Persuasion" as well as the poem by Wordsworth. Then complete the activity.
The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ch. 10
"The cultivated chequer of green and red-brown breaks, with a kind of joyous indiscipline, into a cascade of trees and undergrowth. There are no roofs. If one flies low enough one can see that the terrain is very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented by strange bluffs and towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the strange foliage around them like the walls of ruined castles."
Persuasion, Ch. 11
"With its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff" is one of the many places that "must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood" .
Appreciating the beauty of nature is very much in the Romantic literary tradition. Read William Wordsworth's poem, "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye Valley during a tour, July 13, 1798" and compare it to the two descriptions of the Undercliff provided above.
Why is the seclusion of the Undercliff important to the plot of "The French Lieutenant's Woman"? How does Mrs. Poulteney's idea of the Undercliff compare with what really happens there? (You can watch this scene (6:50 onward) from the film to refresh your memory).