Jane Austen's Great Estates Trivia Quiz

Answer: Netherfield Park

Netherfield Park was the neighbouring estate to Longbourn, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters. Its new tenant was a Mr. Bingley, whose wealth and status made him an instant target for Mrs. Bennet as a potential husband for her eldest and most beautiful daughter, Jane. The grand house popped up in the storyline from time to time: Jane and Elizabeth Bennet both stayed there after Jane had fallen ill while visiting Mr. Bingley's sisters; Mr. Bingley hosted a ball there on the 26th of November (a date he was able to specifically recall many months later when he met Elizabeth in Derbyshire); and in the final chapter Austen informed her readers that Jane and Mr. Bingley "remained at Netherfield only a twelvemonth" after their marriage because neither of them could cope with living so close to Mrs. Bennet.

The incorrect options are all real-life stately homes located in the county of Hertfordshire where 'Pride and Prejudice' is predominantly set. Hatfield House is the ancestral home of the Earls of Salisbury, Knebworth House is known for having hosted a series of outdoor music concerts and Brocket Hall was once home to the former British Prime Minister Lord Melbourne.

Answer: Their elder half-brother

Elinor and Marianne's father had been a wealthy man, but unfortunately for them most of his property - including Norland Park - was bequeathed to his son by his first marriage and only the relatively small sum of £10,000 remained for his second wife and their three daughters (Elinor and Marianne also had a younger sister named Margaret who played very little role in the storyline). Mr. Dashwood had attempted to ameliorate this situation by extracting a deathbed promise from his son that he would look after his younger half-sisters. However, the younger Mr. Dashwood was married to a selfish, avaricious woman who quickly talked her husband out of all of his good intentions - with the exception of assisting Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters to find somewhere else to live and helping them move out of Norland Park.

Mr. Collins was the heir to the Longbourn estate in 'Pride and Prejudice'.

Answer: Northamptonshire

'Mansfield Park', first published in 1814, was the third of Jane Austen's novels to be made available to the public. It told the story of a poor lieutenant's daughter named Fanny Price who was sent to live with her rich relations at Mansfield Park, a country estate in Northamptonshire. The county is located in the East Midlands area of England and was a two-day journey from Fanny's home city of Portsmouth in the early 19th century.

Mansfield Park was the home of Sir Thomas Bertram, a baronet who had married Fanny's mother's sister, and was initially a place of great unhappiness for Fanny before she became accustomed to life in her new home. Eight years later, Fanny refused an offer of marriage from the rich and eligible Henry Crawford, so her uncle duly packed her back off to Portsmouth in order to "teach her the value of a good income". While Fanny was initially delighted to return to her family, the reality of their living conditions and their lack of manners and gentility led her to realise that Mansfield Park was where she actually wanted to be - or, as Jane Austen put it: "Portsmouth was Portsmouth; Mansfield was home".

Answer: Persuasion

The opening section of Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' dealt with the Elliot family being forced to leave their ancestral home thanks to the spendthrift nature of the vain and self-centred Sir Walter Elliot. The house was instead let to Admiral Croft and his wife, who turned out to be the sister of Anne Elliot's former fiancé, Frederick Wentworth. Sir Walter and his eldest daughter moved to the city of Bath, while Anne - who was particularly unappreciated by her closest family - was left to stay with her married sister, Mary Musgrove, and reflect that "they were gone who deserved not to stay, and that Kellynch Hall had passed into better hands than its owners'."

However, her father's embarrassment gave Anne the opportunity to meet up again with her long lost love when Frederick came to stay with his sister at Kellynch Hall. Although the situation initially proved to be painful for both parties, Austen was eventually able to conjure up a happy ending for them.

Answer: Donwell Abbey

Mr. Knightley of Donwell Abbey was Emma's mentor and friend for many years before he declared his love and married her at the end of Austen's novel. He was also a member of her extended family as the elder brother of her sister's husband and a regular visitor to Hartfield to see both Emma and her elderly father, Mr. Woodhouse. While Hartfield and the local village of Highbury provided the main settings for the novel, Donwell Abbey was a much grander estate. However, Austen did made a point of noting that the Woodhouse family had enough fortune "as to make them scarcely secondary to Donwell Abbey itself".

While most of Austen's novels featured relatively poor young women marrying much wealthier men and moving to their great estates, the events of 'Emma' instead resulted in the rich Mr. Knightley leaving his own home behind in order to move in with his wife after their marriage. The main driver for this unusual arrangement was Mr. Woodhouse, a feeble character who couldn't have been expected to manage on his own if his daughter had done the traditional thing for the time and moved out to live at Donwell Abbey.

All the incorrect options were other estates mentioned in 'Emma'. Randalls was a small estate near Highbury owned by Mr. Weston, Enscombe was a grand estate in Yorkshire owned by the Churchill family and Maple Grove was the "seat" of Mrs. Elton's brother-in-law.

Answer: Barton Park

After being forced to leave Norland Park on the death of the senior Mr. Dashwood, Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters (Elinor, Marianne and Margaret) moved to Barton Cottage. The cottage was part of Sir John Middleton's Barton Park estate that was "within four miles northward of Exeter" - Exeter being Devon's county town. Although Barton Park was a grand estate, Barton Cottage was a relatively small four-bedroomed house that illustrated the considerable drop in fortune that the family had experienced.

Although Sir John Middleton was Mrs. Dashwood's cousin, the two families had not had much contact with each other before the Dashwoods moved to Barton. Mrs. Dashwood had never met Lady Middleton and Austen noted that Elinor and Marianne would have been too young to remember the last time Sir John had visited them.

Delaford was the estate owned by Colonel Brandon, Combe Magna belonged to Mr. Willoughby and Cleveland was the home of the Palmers.

Answer: A chimney-piece in the drawing room had cost £800

The initially unflattering comparison was made by Mr. Collins, the somewhat ridiculous rector of Hunsford (the parish in which Lady Catherine de Bourgh's grand estate of Rosings Park was located). He was a cousin of the Bennet sisters who had visited the family with the intention of making one of them his wife. His excessive gratitude to Lady Catherine meant that he had a tendency to constantly bring her up in conversation and relate stories about the wealth and grandeur of her home. A figure of £800 for a fancy fireplace surround would have sounded like a fabulously extravagant amount in the early 19th century - while inflation estimates vary considerably, £800 in 1813 when 'Pride and Prejudice' was first published would have been worth over £45,000 two hundred years later.

Gold leaf is a common sight on the ornate ceilings of many of Britain's grandest country houses so Rosings Park probably featured some - but it wasn't mentioned by Mr. Collins. In the 2005 film adaptation of 'Pride and Prejudice', Rosings was represented by an Elizabethan mansion called Burghley House (which is more famous for hosting equestrian events) but Austen's description of the house as being "a handsome modern building" dates her version to the late 18th or early 19th century. Burghley House's park - along with many others across England - was designed by the famous landscape architect Lancelot "Capability" Brown.

Answer: A large chest

Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey', had an avid interest in Gothic literature - a genre that mixed romance with mysterious ancient buildings and the horror stories associated with them. Needless to say, Catherine was extremely excited to discover that her friends Eleanor and Henry Tilney had grown up in an abbey and that they had invited her to visit them there - or as Austen put it: "With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant".

Catherine's initial disappointment when the house failed to live up to her expectations of what an ancient abbey should look like (i.e. it had clear glass windows, carpets and contained family knick-knacks) probably led to her fascination with the "immense heavy chest" in the corner of her room and the mysterious papers that she discovered in it but was unable to read until the following morning - when they turned out to be mundane bills! Unfortunately, her experience with the chest didn't dim her imagination and the ancient and somewhat gloomy abbey, along with the mystery she perceived in the circumstances surrounding the death of Eleanor and Henry's mother, caused Catherine to embarrass herself by falsely accusing General Tilney of murder!

Answer: Sotherton Court

Mr. Rushworth was the richest character to appear in one of Jane Austen's novels as he was described as having an income of £12,000 per year - a whole £2,000 a year more than was ascribed to Mr. Darcy in 'Pride and Prejudice'. However, he was also the subject of this less-than-complimentary statement by his prospective brother-in-law, Edmund Bertram: "If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow".

One of Mr. Rushworth's pet projects (about which he talked at some length) was the idea of 'improving' his estate, Sotherton Court, by having a designer come in and advise him on re-landscaping the park around the house. As a result, almost the whole party at Mansfield (the Bertrams, Crawfords and Fanny Price) visited Sotherton to see the estate before any work began. It was on this visit that the inappropriate flirtation between Maria Bertram (who was engaged to Mr. Rushworth) and Henry Crawford reached such a level that it permanently damaged Fanny's opinion of Crawford's character and ultimately led her to refuse his offer of marriage.

Everingham was the estate owned by Henry Crawford, Thornton Lacey was the village where Edmund Bertram was the local clergyman and Compton was an estate owned by a friend of Mr. Rushworth.

Answer: Mr. Bingley

Clearly, Charles Bingley was not serious in his offer to take Pemberley off Darcy's hands if he had wanted to sell it. The conversation was the result of his sister's admiration of the estate and her desire for her brother to buy his own estate and model his home on Darcy's. Caroline Bingley spent much of the novel attempting to ingratiate herself with Darcy in the hope that he would offer to marry her and make her the mistress of Pemberley, a role that even Elizabeth Bennet - a woman who had no intention of marrying for money - recognised as being something to be coveted. However, the key difference between the two women was that Caroline wished to be mistress of Pemberley because it was a great estate that represented Darcy's wealth and standing in society, whereas Elizabeth, on first visiting the estate, was simply "delighted" by it being "a place...where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste".

Some of Britain's greatest country houses have 'played' Pemberley on film and television. Chatsworth House, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, was used in the 2005 film adaptation that starred Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen; Lyme Park was used for the 1995 BBC TV series in which Colin Firth portrayed Mr. Darcy; and Harewood House appeared in the spin-off TV adaptations 'Lost in Austen' and 'Death Comes to Pemberley'.