Jane Austen · 1813 · overland

Jane Austen's 1813 novel. Though chiefly a comedy of manners rooted at home, its turns of feeling are carried by journeys, Elizabeth Bennet's visits to her friend in Kent, to her relations in London, and above all the tour of Derbyshire that brings her unexpectedly to Pemberley and to a changed understanding of Mr. Darcy. The route follows Elizabeth across early-nineteenth-century England.

1. 1
   Longbourn

   At Longbourn in Hertfordshire the five Bennet sisters live under an entail that will leave them nothing, and their mother's entire energy is directed at marrying them off before their father dies and the house passes to Mr Collins.

2. 2
   London

   Going into Kent, the party breaks its journey at Gracechurch Street with the Gardiners - the Cheapside relations the Bingley sisters find so funny, and who will do more for this family than anyone in Grosvenor Square.

3. 3
   Hunsford

   Visiting Charlotte at the Hunsford parsonage in Kent, under the shadow of Lady Catherine's Rosings, Elizabeth is proposed to in terms so insulting that she refuses - and then reads the letter that begins to change her mind.

4. 4
   London

   Coming back from Kent she stops again in Cheapside with Jane - and it is in London that Jane's hopes have been quietly managed out of existence, and to London that Lydia will eventually be traced.

5. 5
   Longbourn

   Home for the summer, where the Gardiners come to fetch her - their planned tour of the Lakes cut back to Derbyshire by Mr Gardiner's business, which is the accident on which the rest of the novel turns.

6. 6
   Oxford

   The tour begins. Austen names its stops and then declines to describe them - Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth, Birmingham are, she writes, sufficiently known, which is why her readers knew the itinerary at once.

7. 7
   Blenheim

   Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, the nation's gift to Marlborough and the grandest house on the road north - an obvious halt on any picturesque tour, and a useful measure of what Elizabeth will shortly make of Pemberley.

8. 8
   Warwick

   Warwick Castle on its rock above the Avon, one of the fixed points of the English tour - the party doing exactly what comfortable travellers of 1813 did with a summer, a carriage and a guidebook.

9. 9
   Kenilworth

   Kenilworth, ruined since the Civil War and already visited for the ruin's own sake - the taste for ivy and broken walls being the picturesque enthusiasm Austen handles so drily elsewhere in the novel.

10. 10
    Birmingham

    Birmingham, the manufacturing town, is the last of the named stops before Derbyshire - and the one that sits oddest in a novel of drawing rooms, which is presumably why Austen lists it and moves briskly on.

11. 11
    Pemberley

    In Derbyshire she tours Pemberley believing its owner away, hears the housekeeper speak of him as nobody else ever has, and meets Darcy himself in the grounds - and the novel turns on a house.