Pride, Prejudice, and Georgian Architecture

Mr. Darcy was my first love—though looking back, I think I was less entranced with the man himself and more with the manicured landscapes and elaborate cornices of the world he represented. The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I was fourteen years old. I spent that summer daydreaming about the Georgian manors of the early 19th-century English countryside. The era that Jane Austen described captivated me. I wondered what it would be like to live a day in Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes. 

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I immediately returned to these thoughts when I saw that Jane Austen’s 51.64-acre family estate has been listed for £8.5 million (or around $10.5 million) by Savills, a British real estate company. Unfortunately, the original structure where Austen wrote three of her most famous novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Northanger Abbey (1817), was demolished by her brother in 1826. However, the existing 7,000-square-foot structure, boasting six bedrooms and four bathrooms, was built shortly thereafter by the Austen family. Listed as a structure of Grade II historical significance, the complex retains many of the Georgian architectural elements associated with Austen’s novels.

As a whole, Georgian architecture is relatively difficult to pin down. The term encompasses a broad range of designs employed in English-speaking countries between the years 1714 and 1830. Though the specific elements of Georgian architecture vary, most of these buildings share classical ornamentation, hipped roofs, crown moldings, multi-paned sash windows, and embellished entrances. 

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Austen’s family home is a simplified, stripped-down version of Georgian architecture. The white stucco exterior gives the building a more polished look than brick, which would traditionally be used. Even so, the hipped roof and embellished entrance ensure that conventional Georgian elements are not lost. The interior exhibits a similar adherence to the style of the period. I can almost imagine the Bennet girls running over the hardwood floors and reading beside the ornate fireplaces. 

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Ed Sudgen, the director of Savills, remarked that “the Georgian masterpiece… perfectly befits the milieu that Austen captured in her writing.” Indeed, the house feels almost like a movie set— a perfectly preserved version of the world Austen taught us all to dream about.