The Bennet family – Mrs Bennet, Mr Bennet, and their five daughters – live in Longbourn. Netherfield Park, which the Bingleys, along with Charles Bingley’s friend Fitzwilliam Darcy, move to at the start of the novel, is close by. Meryton is the nearby town where the militia, including George Wickham, are stationed for part of the novel. The location on my map follows the theory that Meryton is based on Ware in Hertfordshire. This is the residence of Fitzwilliam Darcy and his sister Georgianna. In the novel, it is mentioned that Chatsworth House is nearby, as it is one of the locations Elizabeth Bennet visits with her aunt and uncle on their tour of Derbyshire. Chatsworth House has also been used as the filming location for Pemberley in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and the BBC miniseries Death Comes to Pemberley. Thus Chatsworth House is the closest real life approximation of Pemberley, and is where I have placed the marker for Pemberley.

Points on the map A screenshot showing the key points on the map. Maps generally only show space, but Austen’s novels focus on social commentary, so in order to discuss place, it is necessary to apply the social aspects of Pride and Prejudice to its mapped locations. According to Yi Fu Tuan’s theory of place and space in ‘Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective’, we can define space simply as physical location, whereas place also takes into account one’s position in society. Using Google MyMaps, I explored how gender in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice could be mapped, as well as the limitations when trying to map social experiences. Here, Lex considers how mapping Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) might complicate our understandings of gender relations in the novel.

For more information about this task, please get in touch with the module tutor, Joanna Taylor. That map should raise questions about the ways that we conceive of or understand place/space in the text. Their brief was to select a nineteenth-century text and to use a digital mapping tool such as Google MyMaps or CartoDB to create a map of an element of their chosen text. This semester, the new English Literature MA module Nineteenth Century Literature: Place – Space – Text asked students to complete a digital map for their formative assessment. By Lex Elliott (MA Student, Lancaster University)

Jane pride and prejudice