Persuasion

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.

Anne Elliot

Kellynch Hall, Somerset

Ch. 1 · 0% through the novel

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.

The novel opens on Sir Walter reading his own entry in the Baronetage. His vanity and debt force the family to let Kellynch and retrench to Bath, and it is the tenants he takes on, Admiral and Mrs Croft, who bring Captain Wentworth back into Anne's orbit. The house Anne loves and must leave is the still centre the whole story turns away from and, eight years after a broken engagement, back toward.

inspired by Kellynch Hall, seat of Sir Walter Elliot, is invented, but Austen sites it firmly "in Somersetshire" and the geography of the novel (Uppercross three miles off, Lyme seventeen) places it in the market country of south Somerset. No single real house is the model; the pin marks the real town of Crewkerne, near the Dorset border, as a representative anchor for the Elliot estate.

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