Jane Austen’s guide to the property market

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s classic novel – in which the pursuit of love is linked inextricably to future wealth and real estate. And while a man must be in want of a wife, a woman would most definitely be in want of a place to live. Not marrying in the Regency era could easily leave a woman stranded – dwindling into a much-loved maiden aunt, perhaps, or working as a governess in someone else’s home. 

Austen’s success as a novelist stemmed to a large degree from her keen observation of not just the highs and lows of love, but also the ups and downs of Regency society, its winners and losers. For, in the story played out by the Bennets, Bingleys, Darcys and de Bourghs, the spectacular homes aren’t just the settings. They’re the prizes.

The story has a happy ending for our heroines, Lizzie Bennet and her sister Jane, who marry into money and for love. And if their husbands happen to have the Regency equivalent of a prime property portfolio, all the better, as is made clear when Lizzie jestingly responds to Jane’s question about the moment she fell for Mr Darcy: “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” So what’s in the real-estate cast of characters in Pride and Prejudice?

The manor house
The Bennets live at Longbourn House, the grandest home in their village, with an estate bringing in £2,000 a year (about £200,000 in today’s money). This makes them haves, rather than have-nots, in Regency England, for all that the snobbish Bingley sisters look down on them.

The Bennets’ home might have looked like Court Lodge in Chelsfield, near Bromley in southeast London, a handsome Georgian house with a guide price of £10m. It is lovely enough to “put your rival’s nose out of joint”, says Will Peppitt of Savills Country House Department – and it has a pool. 

The country house
Three truly grand country houses feature in the novel. First, Netherfield, just up the road from Longbourn House, but infinitely grander – and when it is “taken” by the handsome Charles Bingley, along with his haughty sisters and the even haughtier Fitzwilliam Darcy, the wheels are set in motion for Lizzie and Jane’s Regency romances.

The next to appear is Rosings in Kent, where Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy’s aunt, lives in state. It’s very grand indeed, but the house with which generations of readers have fallen in love is Pemberley, in a fine setting in Derbyshire. 

Pemberley remains the fictional ideal of an English country house – and, unlike the Bingleys, who are renting Netherfield, the Darcys are thoroughly hitched to the estate. Those in search of something similar need look no further than Denham Place in Buckinghamshire, with a guide price of £45m – which gives you a sense of the social heights Lizzie is scaling. 

Today, though, many of us would prefer to be a Bingley and rent a place in the country – perhaps The Grange in Horsington, Somerset, authentically Austen in look and feel, but with mod cons such as a sauna and plunge pool. As Laura Lane, head of Savills Southern Region Lettings, explains: “Today, many people live a more transient life – perhaps they are in the UK for a time for business, or their children are being educated here – so it makes more sense to rent somewhere for three to five years. It’s not as big a financial commitment.” 

The rectory
When Lizzie goes to visit the newly wed Mr and Mrs Collins in their snug parsonage on the edge of Rosings Park, she feels he’s showing off the parlour, “as if wishing to make her feel what she had lost in refusing him”. The daughter and sister of parsons, Austen was well aware of the social gulf that lay between the wealthy patron in the big house and the clergyman in the more humble rectory. 

The irony now is that a Georgian rectory – handsomely proportioned, capacious without being vast, cosy in the village – is for many of us more appealing than a Rosings or a Pemberley. As Peppitt says, while “there will always be a client for whom a really grand house and the estate that comes with it remains the most desirable country home, for others it is a former rectory or manor house deftly brought up to date”. And where sweeter than the exquisite Old Vicarage in Hawkhurst, Kent, listed for £3.5m.

The London townhouse
London is largely off stage in Pride and Prejudice. Bingley and Darcy probably have townhouses in Mayfair – then, as now, highly covetable, though today some of us might prefer to live laterally in a turnkey residence such as 60 Curzon (from £4.35m). Modern residents of Clapham would be dismayed to discover that Mr Darcy is practically slumming it when he heads there in search of wicked Mr Wickham and flighty Lydia Bennet. And the social distance between Bingley’s life in Mayfair and Jane’s visit to the Gardiners, in trade and living in the City, is so great that they never bump into each other.

There are no townhouses on Gracechurch Street these days. Perhaps the equivalent would be a penthouse in Canary Wharf – or Shoreditch, perhaps, an area that might appeal to today’s business high-flyers. And wherever they live, a tech entrepreneur in possession of a good fortune must surely be in want of a life partner.