Vintage View: Country houses played a major role in the works of Jane Austen

On the 200th anniversary of the death of English novelist Jane Austen, Kya deLongchamps explore the role of large country houses in her stories

Picture: Julie Anne Workman

NO matter what its dilapidated condition, or discreet debt surrounding it — an 18th century family seat plus a mention in Debrett’s Peerage, marks you out as a person of influence. Just as Molly Keane spied on her tribe, Jane Austen gives us an intimate insight into a lost and flawed world of balls, broken hearts, the limitation of behaviour and the meticulous art of climbing through the ranks.

Themes of position, unsanctioned romance, exhausting (if hilarious) social jousting and the horrifying spectre of being caught fraternising with inferiority, is explored in all of her books. Even her disrupting heroes and heroines cling to the accepted privileges and exquisite hypocrisies which came with having a big, old house, the stones firmly cemented with the pedigree of its inhabitants.