Pemberley
Pemberley is the fictional country estate owned by Fitzwilliam Darcy, the male protagonist in Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice". It is located near the fictional town of Lambton, and believed by some to be based on Chatsworth House, near Bakewell in Derbyshire.
Elizabeth Bennet
The British literacy critic Robert Irvine stated that the reference in the novel to the militia being mobilised and lacking sufficient barracks, requiring them to set up camps in the countryside dates the setting of the novel to the years 1793-1795 as the militia was mobilised in 1793 after France declared war on the United Kingdom and the last of the barracks for the militia were completed by 1796. Irvine argued that a central concern in Britain in the 1790s, when Austen wrote the first draft of "Pride and Prejudice" under the title "First Impressions" was the need for British elites, both national and regional to rally around the flag in face of the challenge from revolutionary France. It is known that Austen was working on "First Impressions" by 1796 (it is not clear when she began working on the book) and finished off "First Impressions" in 1797. Irvine states while the character of Elizabeth is a clearly middle-class while Mr. Darcy is part of the aristocracy. Irvine wrote "Elizabeth, in the end, is awed by Pemberly, and her story ends with her delighted submission to Darcy in marriage. It is "gratitude" that forms the foundation of Elizabeth Bennet's "love" for Fitzwilliam Darcy: caught in a reciprocal gaze with Darcy's portrait at Pemberly, impressed with the evidence of his social power that surrounds her, Elizabeth 'thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before'...Elizabeth's desire for Darcy does not happen "despite" the difference in their social situation: it is "produced" by that difference, and can be read as a vindication of the hierarchy which constructs that difference in the first place". Irvine observes that Darcy spends about half his time in London while for people in Meryton London is a stylish place that is very far away, observing that a key difference is when one of the Bennett family is ill, they use the services of a local apothecary while Mr. Darcy calls upon a surgeon from London. In this regard, Irvine argued that the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy stands for the union of local and national elites in Britain implicitly against the challenge to the status quo represented by the French republic.