Where’s Where in Jane Austen’s Novels

The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex.

A defining characteristic of Jane Austen’s fiction is its realism, which is manifest in details of speech, manner, lifestyle, and even geography. In each novel her “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” are situated in a specific part of England. Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel, begins, “The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex.” Austen uses the removal of the Dashwood women from Norland Park in Sussex to Barton Cottage in distant Devonshire to underscore both their exile from a cherished home and their displacement from an established social position to a modest life among strangers.

Austen always names the county in which a novel’s action is set and often mentions cities and landmarks, though her villages and estates are invented. This section reproduces maps of the novels from Where’s Where in Jane Austen . . . and What Happens There, by Patrick Wilson, published by the Jane Austen Society of Australia. The maps include both real and fictional places, and the book provides information about more than 400 locations in Austen’s fiction. It is available for purchase on JASA’s web site.

Further Reading

Pride and Prejudice

The Probable Location of Longbourn in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, by Kenneth Smith

Pemberley Revisited, by Donald Greene

Mansfield Park

Exploring Mansfield Park: In the Footsteps of Fanny Price, by John Wiltshire

Portsmouth in Jane Austen’s Time, by B. C. Thomas

Emma

“It Must Be Done in London”: The Suburbanization of Highbury, by Tara Ghoshal Wallace

Northanger Abbey

Yes, There is a Petty France, by Dean Cantrell

Persuasion

The “Positioning Systems” of Persuasion, by Laura Mooneyham White

Why Lyme Regis?, by Peter Graham

“What Part of Bath Do You Think They Will Settle In?”: Jane Austen’s Use of Bath in Persuasion by Keiko Parker