Jane Austen's England: Experience author's life in romantic countryside

"Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection."

— Jane Austen, in an 1814 letter to her niece, Fanny Knight

She was a master of stories of romantic love yet found little in her own life. The happy endings in which affection and respect trump class and crass didn't quite play out in her own short time on Earth. She lived most of her life in a beautiful corner of England — but used it only once as the locale of her immensely popular books.

Jane Austen's quiet birth, life and death in early 19th century Hampshire are not the stuff of romantic legend. But more than 200 years after her birth, Austen's books are romantic icons. They've been translated into dozens of languages, filmed for screens big and small and spawned a range of copycat projects ranging from obsessive 21st century fans in "The Jane Austen Book Club" to the campy bestselling "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" that extends Austen's signature tussles of Victorian manners and morals to the brain-gobbling living-dead gentry.

"Janeites" are the fans who have read and reread the books and when given the chance, scour the English countryside for all the places, real and imaginary, connected with Austen and her books. Where exactly is Pemberley, and is the brooding Mr. Darcy "in residence" as Miss Elizabeth Bennet inquires in "Pride and Prejudice"?

My own Austen journeys have stretched from Steventon, where Austen was born, to Winchester, where she died — with stops in Bath, Southampton, Portsmouth, Oxford and Chawton along the way.

These journeys were taken up out of love — not for Austen, but for my wife, whose stacks of dog-eared Austen paperbacks are on the short shelf next to her nightstand. I am not so much a "Janeite" as an enabler of one. So I offer the apology for a dabbler who writes about what millions across the planet embrace with so much passion.

So take a journey to the world that created the mind that created Elizabeth and Darcy, Elinor and Edward, Emma and Mr. Knightley. We'll just try to avoid Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She might not approve of insolence and mushy breeding.

"Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?"

STEVENTON

"To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment."

— Jane Austen