Pride and Prejudice

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.

Elizabeth Bennet

Longbourn, Hertfordshire

Ch. 7 · 10% through the novel

The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton; a most convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usually tempted thither three or four times a week, to pay their duty to their aunt, and to a milliner's shop just over the way.

The whole first half of the novel turns on this one-mile walk. Longbourn is the Bennet home, where Mrs. Bennet schemes to marry off five daughters; Meryton is where the militia quarters for the winter and the girls chase officers. Austen never fixes either on a real map, but she pins the neighbourhood to Hertfordshire and a day's ride from London, and that geography drives the plot.

inspired by Longbourn, the Bennets' house, and the market town of Meryton a mile off are both invented, but Austen sites them firmly in Hertfordshire, "only four-and-twenty miles" from London. No single real house is the model; the pin marks Hertford, the county town, as a representative real market town at about the right distance from the capital.

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