Mapped
Emma
Jane Austen
Clever, rich and idle, Emma Woodhouse amuses herself matchmaking among the little society of her Surrey village, blundering through other people's hearts and her own until she learns what she has felt all along. Austen keeps the whole comedy within a few miles of real countryside: the family house at Hartfield and the village of Highbury, Mr Knightley's Donwell Abbey, and the outing to Box Hill where Emma's thoughtlessness brings her up short.
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Persuasion
Jane Austen
Austen's last completed novel runs on a line from the Somerset countryside to Georgian Bath and out to the Dorset coast. Kellynch Hall and Uppercross are invented estates, but she plants them firmly in Somersetshire, near the real market country around Crewkerne and Taunton. Bath is the real spa city, named street by street: the Elliots take a house in Camden Place, the real Camden Crescent up on Lansdown, and Anne walks Milsom Street, the Pump Room and the White Hart inn. And at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast the party walks out on the Cobb, the real stone harbour wall, where Louisa Musgrove falls. The map draws Anne Elliot's England, from a Somerset drawing-room to the sea wall at Lyme and back to Bath.
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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Austen builds her world out of invented houses set on real English ground. Longbourn and Meryton are fictional, but she plants them in Hertfordshire, four-and-twenty miles from London, near the real market towns of the county. The Gardiners' home in Gracechurch Street, by Cheapside, is a real City address; Mr. Collins's Hunsford is sited near the real Westerham in Kent; the militia camp at Brighton is the real resort; and the Derbyshire tour runs through the actual Peak, past Matlock, Dovedale and Chatsworth, where readers have looked for Pemberley ever since. The map draws the arc of Elizabeth's England, from a Hertfordshire drawing-room to the great house in the Derbyshire hills.
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Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Dispossessed of their home, the Dashwood sisters, prudent Elinor and passionate Marianne, retire to a Devon cottage and are schooled by love and disappointment in the balance of sense and sensibility. Austen sets the story across a real England: the Sussex estate they lose, the Devon country of their new life and Marianne's romance, the London where hearts are broken, and the western house where illness brings the reckoning.
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