Wentworth Woodhouse

When the chancellor of the Exchequer announced this week that the British government planned to pour £7.6 million, about $9.48 million, into restoring Wentworth Woodhouse, an English stately home “said to be the inspiration for Pemberley in Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice,’” he probably didn’t expect a backlash. But that’s just what he got.

“There is absolutely no evidence that Jane Austen ever traveled further north than Lichfield in Staffordshire,” the Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom said after the announcement, part of the Autumn Statement by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, which outlines the government’s overall spending plan. Wentworth Woodhouse is about 70 miles north of Lichfield.

“Jane Austen, herself only too keenly aware of the value of money, and of the need for veracity, would have been savvy enough to know that a building the size of Wentworth Woodhouse with its estimated number of over 300 rooms and its estate of over 15,000 acres could not possibly have been supported on Mr. Darcy’s reported income of a mere £10,000 per annum,” the statement continued. nytimes