Where’s Where in Jane Austen’s Novels
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.
- Sense and Sensibility
- Pride and Prejudice
- Mansfield Park
- Emma
- Northanger Abbey
- Persuasion
- Map of English Counties
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