I also found this Charlotte Brontë quote concerning Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice interesting in relation to the scope of this course.  I know we are reading Sense and Sensibility, but this might provide an interesting way to look at Austen's overall portrayal of nature.

In 1848, 41 years after Austen’s death, Charlotte Brontë picked up Pride and Prejudice on the recommendation of friend and literary critic George Henry Lewes. Brontë, author of the grim “romance” Jane Eyre, wasn’t backwards about coming forward with her criticism: “Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point,” she writes, explaining that she got the book after Lewes talked it up. “And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, high-cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

http://mentalfloss.com/article/32099/7-people-who-hated-pride-and-prejudice