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Book review
Where’s Where In Jane Austen ... And What Happens There

by Patrick Wilson

The Jane Austen Society of Australia, 2002
AUD15.00

Reviewed by Harriet Veitch & Phillippa Miskiewicz

The title of Patrick Wilson’s book says it all: Patrick has produced a thorough quick reference to every spot, even the most obscure, mentioned in any of Austen’s (fictional) works. 

If you want to know if Bengal turned up in Austen, a quick glance will tell you it did, in Catharine, and why. Another quick glance will tell you that Australia didn’t make the grade, but Europe did, if only because poor little Fanny Price couldn’t put a map of it together. 

Sometimes the references seem a little far-fetched, such as Fanny’s Europe, and Hungary is listed because in Evelyn, Mr Gower is revived by having his forehead chafed with Hungary water. But then much smaller places than countries are included, and well worth their space. Mansfield Park’s East Room that is Fanny Price’s retreat is as important a place as London in the scheme of things. 

Wilson has done excellent work in finding all these places and setting them down in easy-to-read sections, and you can easily see which Austen book is being referred to. 

The seven maps included are fascinating, one each for Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and one of Bath, so you can follow your favourite characters across England’s landscape or up Milsom St. You can see how small Emma’s compass was, and how far Miss Elizabeth Bennet travelled. Even though Fanny Price’s life seems circumscribed, Mansfield Park’s characters ranged right across the south of England. 

The maps also give you something that the text doesn’t. The text treats all places as equally valid, but the maps have different symbols for places real and fictional. This makes a lot of difference and, I think, could have been incorporated in the text. Sometimes it obviously makes no difference, we all know that London exists, but did you know there actually is a village of Fullerton in Hampshire? How much relationship it bears to Catherine Morland’s Fullerton is another question, and one that isn’t answered here. 

What was, and is, Fullerton like? Is it just a coincidence of names, or did Austen have a specific place in mind to tell us something about Catherine Morland’s character from where she lived? 

This is where the book is a small disappointment, it would be good to know which places are real and which are imaginary, and it would be even better to know something about the real places. Some entries have a little information, London has a quick introduction, but it would be more interesting to know a little about all the smaller real towns and places, to get some more idea of Austen’s world. 

Bristol could have done with some information, it was a busy seaport and a place where people made money (for one thing, the city played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries), so it seems the right place for the Sucklings in Emma to come from when you know that. 

Susannah Fullerton’s most interesting introduction tells us more about what the places mean. She says ‘Jane Austen had an unerring sense of place’ and ‘the locations in which she places her characters are chosen with care and reason’, but the book doesn’t really show us this, which is a shame. 

However, what the book does, it does well. It gives a quick overview of Austen’s places and it gives a good, succinct précis of what happened in these places. 

As a small reference book, it should have a place on your Austen bookshelf. 

There is much more work that could be done on the subject of places and their meanings in Austen, and if you want to start studying, this is the book to begin with, with all your targets laid out for you.

Harriet Veitch

What happened in Brock Street? Is Bath mentioned in every novel? When Captain Wentworth went to Shropshire, how far did he go to get way from Louisa Musgrove? These questions and many more are answered in this delightfully informative book. 

Patrick Wilson has thoroughly researched the geography of Austen’s novels and compiled an excellent look into her world, both real and fictional. Every place mentioned in all novels and juvenilia are alphabetically listed with a short description of what happens at each place, in each novel. These notes are either reminders of scenes we know and love, or little morsels to whet your appetite to read or re-read about a place you didn’t know. I thoroughly enjoyed looking at the maps of each novel and referring to the notes of each place, making sense of travels mentioned that are otherwise merely just a list of place names. These are places where friends of our imagination live and I loved getting to know them better. 

This is an enjoyable read for any Austen enthusiast, a great tool for teachers and an advertisement to travel there yourself. 

Phillippa Miskiewicz

14 January 2003

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