Literary places in Hertfordshire

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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