This year, the world celebrates 250 years of Jane Austen, one of the English language’s most beloved novelists. Discover some of the places that Jane Austen lived, or that inspired locations in her works and their TV and film adaptations.
Jane Austen was born in 1775 and was one of eight children in a well-to-do family in Hampshire, England. Her work is set in and around this area of England - a county to the south-west of London, with a diverse landscape of rolling countryside, historic towns and coastal scenery.
Austen wrote six novels, the most famous of which are Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, as well as early writings from the age of 11 to 17 published under the title Juvenilia. Austen died in 1817, leaving two unfinished novels, Sanditon and The Watsons.
Jane Austen’s work tells of the ups and downs of life in sophisticated Regency society, stories told with wit, irony and a cutting critique of social hierarchy. As she writes in Pride and Prejudice in 1813:
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?
Birth, life and death
The Austens were a wealthy family in the village of Horsmonden, Kent, who made their money as wool merchants. The family had two houses there, including one owned by Jane Austen's great-grandfather. Jane herself was born in Steventon, Hampshire, and lived in a spacious and comfortable rectory, as her father was the local vicar.
Following her father's retirement in 1801, Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra and their parents, moved to Bath. Jane lived there from 1801 to 1806, at several different addresses. Both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey are partly set in Bath. The city is now home to the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street, a street named in Persuasion and on which Jane Austen lived for a while in 1805.
Throughout her life, Austen also spent time living in Southampton, Chawton (in a house referred to in her letters as the 'Great House' and now open to visitors), and Winchester. She visited other areas of the country, such as London, Clifton, and Derbyshire, which no doubt influenced settings in her novels.
Jane Austen died, aged 41, in Winchester. She is buried at Winchester Cathedral.
Country houses
A Jane Austen novel must have a grand country house as its setting, and while all of Austen's stately homes are fictional, they may well be based on real places, and have certainly seen real houses and castles assume their position in adaptations for both big and small screens.
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, published after her death, centres around Catherine and her relationship with the Tilney family, who live at Northanger Abbey, a grand house with a section of mysterious rooms noone ever enters. The inspiration for Northanger Abbey may have been Tintern Abbey in Wales. However, Lismore Castle, Ireland, was the setting used in the 2007 film adaptation.
Towns and villages
Austen's novels are set in and around known areas of England - Somerset, Derbyshire, Devon, for example - but some of the towns and villages are fictional.