A village affair

AS an attentive aunt, Jane Austen was keen to encourage her niece, Anna, with the novel she was writing. ‘Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,’ she wrote to her in 1814, adding, ‘such a spot… is the delight of my life’. We do not know what became of Anna Austen’s novel, but the manuscript on which her aunt was working at the time—Emma— in just such a setting, would become her masterpiece.

takes place in the fictitious Highbury in Surrey, a ‘large and populous village almost amounting to a town’. We are told it is some seven miles from Box Hill, where the pivotal picnic scene takes place at which