Pride and Prejudice - Facts

 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen was published in 1813. Pride and Prejudice has consistently appeared near the top of lists of "most-loved books" among literary scholars and the reading public. It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature, with over 20 million copies sold

The Bennets live in Hertfordshire. Hertfordshire is a county in the East of England and it borders Bedfordshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the north-east, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south and Buckinghamshire to the west. 

One of the worries that Mrs Bennet has is that the house where she and her daughters live is entailed, which means that it will be inherited by Mr Bennet's closest male relative. In English common law, fee tail or entail is a form of trust, established by deed or settlement, that restricts the sale or inheritance of an estate in real property and prevents that property from being sold, devised by will, or otherwise alienated by the tenant-in-possession, and instead causes it to pass automatically, by operation of law, to an heir determined by the settlement deed. The fee tail allowed a patriarch to perpetuate his blood-line, family-name, honour and armorials in the persons of a series of powerful and wealthy male descendants. 

Mr Collins, who proposes to Lizzie and is to inherit Longbourn, lives in Kent. Kent is a  county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Greater London to the north-west. 

Pemberley, Mr Darcy's home, is in Derbyshire. Derbyshire is a county in the East Midlands of England. It borders Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and South Yorkshire to the north, Nottinghamshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south-east, Staffordshire to the south and west, and Cheshire to the west.