It is a clichéd truth universally acknowledged that an estate agent in possession of a Georgian house for sale is in want of a Jane Austen connection to flog it.
Austen, who would surely while away hours on Rightmove if she were alive today, peppered her prose with many mentions of property. Phyllis Richardson, the author of House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life, explains that Austen begins five of her six completed novels by explaining her characters’ relationships with their properties and the predicaments that these cause. “Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey place the house at the forefront of the stories even before the first lines appear,” she notes.
And in Emma, Austen writes:
