The “Real” Audley Court

“It lay down in a hollow.” So Mary Elizabeth Braddon begins Lady Audley’s Secret, the quintessential sensation novel and one of the best-selling novels of the 19th century. The “it” here is the country house, Audley Court, site of the novel’s most memorable—and most sensational—incidents. Repeatedly, Braddon returns us to this home, with its Gothic resonances and possibly fatal secrets. Audley Court represents the culmination of the character Lucy Graham’s desires, to be the mistress of a fine house; it’s the prison her lies have constructed; and it’s a symbol of ongoing patriarchal and upper-class rule. In Victorian Britain, such houses, argues Elizabeth Langland, “metaphorically and metonymically stood for power and one’s moral entitlement to that power” (6-7).

Readers and scholars have frequently attempted to find the originals of famous literary homes, with three candidates for the original of Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley: Lyme Park in Cheshire, Chatsworth House and Wentworth Woodhouse, both in Yorkshire.

Three homes are said to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights: the now demolished High Sunderland Hall in Halifax; Ponden Hall and the ruined farmhouse Top Withens, both near the Brontes’ village of Haworth.  

Two houses have been offered as the model for Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre:  High Sunderland Hall in Halifax (also thought to have inspired Wuthering Heights) and North Lees Hall in the village of Hathersage, near Sheffield.

Often, the alleged literary connections of these houses become a matter of fact and a selling point for tourists. Now a national park, North Lees Hall, for instance, announces on its website that “In 1845 Charlotte Bronte visited the Hall several times while staying with her friend Ellen Nussey at the Vicarage in nearby Hathersage. It became the principal inspiration for Thornfield Hall in the novel ‘Jane Eyre’, described as: ‘three storeys high; a gentleman’s manor house; battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look’. They still do!” (“North”).

The three inspirations for Pemberley differ in their claims to literary fame. The website for Wentworth Woodhouse makes no such claim but does offer visitors the opportunity for “a unique Regency Afternoon Tea, including a Jane Austen experience in the beautiful Whistlejacket Room. Enjoy a lively and entertaining performance, celebrating the life, mind and writings of one of our greatest novelists before heading to the Long Gallery for a delicious afternoon tea and glass of prosecco. This event is certainly a must for all Jane Austen fans!” (“Regency”). This reticence probably is due less to prudence than to the British government’s having attempted to justify spending over seven million pounds to refurbish Wentworth by citing its connection to Austen, to which “the Jane Austen Society [replied] there is no evidence Austen ever went to the house or that a character such as Fitzwilliam Darcy could ever have afforded to live there” (qtd. in Syal and Cain), further explaining that “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” (qtd. in Shea).

At Lyme Park, one can take the Pemberley Walk and “Follow in the footsteps of Mr Darcy and the BBC film crew. Discover some of the idyllic filming locations from the 1995 BBC adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’” (“Pemberley”). Likewise, Chatsworth House trumpets its connection to a film adaptation. “On your visit,” it’s advised, “you may recognise the grand staircase and ceiling of the Painted Hall where Lizzie and the Gardiners start their tour of Pemberley. The Sculpture Gallery was used in the scene where Lizzie Bennet sees the bust of Mr Darcy, and his housekeeper describes his many good qualities.” Visitors are also alerted to a possible souvenir: “we still have the bust of Mr Darcy, played by Matthew Macfadyen. The bust is made of resin mixed with marble dust and was created by Nick Dutton in 2004 as a prop for the film. It can be found in the Orangery shop, through the Sculpture Gallery” (“Pride”). In declaring a connection not to Austen films but to Austen’s novel, Chatsworth House carefully qualifies its claim: “It is believed that Jane Austen may have based her idea of Pemberley on Chatsworth House.”

Many worshipful readers also make pilgrimages to the homes and burial sites of authors, to Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester and to Emily and Charlotte’s in Haworth. But it’s a rare reader who seeks out Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s grave in London. Likewise, despite its steadily growing literary reputation, Lady Audley’s Secret remains far from the level of popularity at which tourists would seek out the site of its real-world inspiration. In fact, there’s been little discussion, by the public or by scholars, of the inspiration for Audley Court. That wasn’t the case, though, at the height of Braddon’s fame in the 19^th century. According to the biographer and theater critic and sculptor and painter Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald, “Lady Audley’s mansion . . . was, as it might be expected, sought to be identified, and various gloomy abodes in the country were named” (280).

The assumption has been that Audley Court was modeled on a manor home in Essex, Ingatestone Hall. When Fitzgerald wrote, years after the novel’s publication, asking Braddon whether this setting had been inspired by any real location, she responded, “there was a long, narrow avenue of tall limes, very quiet, very secluded, and aloof from the garden of a dear old oak-paneled grange in Essex, and it seemed to me one summer evening, walking with the master of the house, that this lime-walk suggested something uncanny in the history of domestic crime. So I said to my host, ‘If I were to take this house of yours as the scene of a novel, would you mind very much if I made the inhabitants a rather bad set of people?’ ‘Mind! People it with fiends if you like, my dear!’ said he” (qtd. in Wolff 132).

In his biography of Braddon, Robert Wolff quotes this passage and adds a note: “Strong local tradition at Ingatestone, Essex, identifies the celebrated family house of the Petre family there . . . with [Braddon’s] Audley Court. And indeed, its clock with one hand over the stables and its avenue of limes make the identification plausible” (437n40). The author of a local history, E.E. Wilde, also asserts that Ingatestone stood as the model for Audley Court, writing, “Miss Braddon laid the scene of her thrilling novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, at Ingatestone Hall. Her description of Audley Court is, in the main, a correct description of the Hall, though she is in error in stating that the place had at one time been a  convent. Miss Braddon stayed in the vicinity whilst writing the book, and reproduces in it a very good picture of the neighbourhood” (303). (It seems that while Wilde is technically correct about Ingatestone’s not having been a convent, there had been a nunnery at this location: “In about 950 AD, King Edgar granted to the Abbey of Our Lady & St. Ethelburga at Barking lands at Yenge-atte-Stone (whence we get the modern name of Ingatestone). . . . one of the principal manors held by the nuns of Barking, it subsequently also became known as Gynge Abbes.” (“Story”). So there is some connection between a convent and Ingatestone Hall, or more accurately the property upon which it sits.

Further evidence suggesting a connection between Ingatestone and Braddon appears in the town’s census. There’s  a possibility that John Maxwell, Braddon’s editor, long-time paramour, and eventual husband, lived in the village of Ingatestone. From the late 18th century to 1915, the Petre family lived elsewhere, renting out Ingatestone Hall (“Ingatestone” [Wikipedia]).  John, the 18th and present Baron Petre, current owner of Ingatestone Hall, speculated that in April 1860 Braddon met Maxwell in Ingatestone Hall where he was renting an apartment (Fletcher 3). A “John Maxwell, Esq.” is recorded as living in the village of Ingatestone in 1863 (“History”). One genealogy website, which has him living in Ingatestone in 1861, identifies this John Maxwell as marrying Mary Elizabeth Braddon. And one English newspaper recently claimed that “By 1861 Mary and her mother had taken up residence with Maxwell in [Maxwell’s] house in Ingatestone, Essex” (James). Despite these claims, I can find no definitive evidence that the John Maxwell who lived in Ingatestone in the early 1860s was the same John Maxwell whom Mary Elizabeth Braddon married, let alone that they lived together there. Her biographer, Robert Wolff, merely says it’s likely that she once visited Ingatestone Hall.

This biographical speculation notwithstanding, comparing Ingatestone to Braddon’s description of Audley Court would seem to confirm a connection between the two. For instance, here’s Braddon describing the approach to the Audley’s country home: “you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows” (7). (The word “limes” here refers to linden or basswood trees.) And, sure enough, the approach to Ingatestone is lined with lime trees.

Of course, many such country houses have long entrances flanked by trees. More substantial proof of the connection between Audley Court and Ingatestone Hall is what we would find if we were to continue down this pleasantly shady path. Writes Braddon, “At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand—and which jumped straight from one hour to the next. . . . Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of Audley Court” (7). This passage is a precise description of the entrance to Ingatestone Hall, down to the missing hand on the clock, which seems,  in the spirit of English eccentricity, to have become a proud symbol of the house (see image above)—although Braddon does not include the Latin motto on this clock, “Sans Dieu Rien” (“Without God, Nothing”), a saying that fits her novel’s conventional ending but that doesn’t sympathize with its overall (not holy) spirit. Braddon also seems to have misremembered the clock. As reported by the Essex Chronicle, “It has four faces. . . . The time is told to the nearest quarter of an hour, there being only hand to each face. The hours are struck by a bell” (“Ingatestone Hall Clock”).

Continuing her tour, Braddon tells us that “To the right there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss. To the left there was a broad graveled walk, down which, years ago, when the place had been a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in hand; a wall bordered with espaliers, and shadowed on one side by goodly oaks, which shut out the flat landscape, and circled in the house and gardens with a darkening shelter” (7).

Again, Braddon’s description mirrors the real Ingatestone Hall, the grounds of which include gardens and walls and a pond and trailing ivy and plenty of trees.

Another connection between the two settings is that both the real and the fictional homes were said to have hidden priests during the persecution of Catholics in the Tudor era. As Hazel Steiner explains, “Two priest holes were found by accident [at Ingatestone Hall] by past members of the family. . . . The Petre family were recusants that refused to accept the new Anglican church. For their safety, they kept their Roman Catholic practices hidden from the public, holding covert masses in their private chapel. The priest holes may have been used to store their Bible and so forth in order to prevent nosy visitors from discovering their secret.” Similarly, Braddon describes “a hiding place so small that he who hid there must have crouched on his hands and knees  . . and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest half filled with priests’ vestments which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to have harboured a Roman Catholic priest, or to have had mass said in his house” (9).

Yet Ingatestone Hall was not the sole model for Audley Court. In his biography of Braddon, Wolff cites Percy Fitzgerald’s correspondence with Braddon, her suggestion that an estate exactly matching Ingatestone Hall had inspired her novel. Wolff goes on to tell us that, besides its mirroring the house in Lady Audley’s Secret, there’s evidence—the manuscript of Braddon’s unfinished novel “Tommy and Harry: The History of a Bad and a Good Boy,” which is postmarked Ingatestone, June 14, 1861—that she visited this house at least once before the composition of Lady Audley’s Secret, thus supporting both Fitzgerald’s claims and “strong local tradition.” But Wolff omits a key point from Fitzgerald’s correspondence. In answer to his question of whether Audley Court was based on a real place, she wrote, “Well there never was, save in the novelist’s imagination. The murderous element in the landscape had to be supplied from the scene-dock’ of fiction.” Braddon returns to her theater days for this metaphor, a “scene dock” being a place near the stage where scenery is stored. Or in this case, it’s that part of her mind—her memory and imagination—from which she draws inspiration for her fictional narrative.  

The problem with asserting Ingatestone’s sole patrimony is simply that  authorial inspiration isn’t so clear-cut: fiction is rarely a matter of such a one-to-one correspondence. When depicting a particular setting, authors may choose an actual place, as, for instance, Nathaniel Hawthorne does in The House of Seven Gables. They may create this place wholly out of imagination. Or they may imaginatively combine places they’ve known, which is what, I believe, Braddon has done. The tree-lined drive, the arch and clock, the pond and ivy-draped building, the walls and garden, multiple chimneys and priestly hiding places are taken from Ingatestone Hall, a place she visited during the initial stages of the creation of Lady Audley’s Secret and which seems to have imprinted itself vividly in her memory. However, the actual Ingatestone Hall doesn’t fully correspond with Braddon’s description of Audley Court, notwithstanding E.E. Wilde’s assertion that Braddon’s “description of Audley Court is, in the main, a correct description of the Hall.”

First, its history doesn’t match. Ingatestone Hall was built on Catholic Church land confiscated during the dissolution of the monasteries, land sold to Sir William Petre, secretary of state to Henry VIII, in 1539. But the history of Audley Court, as Braddon lays it out for us, goes much further back, to the Norman conquest, a half a millennium earlier.

Additionally. Ingatestone Hall was built according to the principles of Tudor architecture; that is, it follows one style and displays a certain amount of symmetry and regularity, which doesn’t at all parallel Braddon’s description of Audley Court, “a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder, Time, who, adding a room one year, and knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall, allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I, to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived, in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex” (8).

What better matches this description is a house Braddon knew well, Skisdon Lodge, the Braddon family home in the village of St. Kew, Cornwall. Skisdon was first “mentioned in 1350. . . . It is believed that the property would have originally been two cottages which were then knocked into one single residence. During the Tudor period, a range of rooms were added to the rear of the original property, with remains of the Tudor hearth evident in the main kitchen” (Savills).

Skisdon Lodge, like Ingatestone Hall (and many other such historic homes), is known for its beautiful and private and tranquil grounds, “A spot,” Braddon describes in her novel, ”in which peace seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and flower, on the still ponds and quiet alleys, the shady corners of the old-fashioned rooms, the deep window-seats behind the painted glass, the low meadows and the stately avenues” (8). Or as she describes Skisdon in a letter to the novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton, it “is a nest in one of the most fertile valleys of Cornwall—mild as Madeira—myrtles & roses climbing to the chimney-pots, tulip trees growing high on the lawn” (qtd. in Wolff 141). “All her life,” Wolff writes, Braddon “loved Skisdon for its warmth, and for the beauty and abundance of its gardens” (19), a sentiment conveyed through her lyrical description of Audley Court. Even the names of these two settings, the metrically identical Audley Court and Skisdon Lodge, suggest that the memory of Skisdon was alive in Braddon’s thoughts as she created Audley Court.

But Braddon chose this name for more than its syllabic symmetry. In 1631, a Lord Audley was beheaded for what one of the novel’s reviewers described as “inflicting indescribable cruelty on his wife” (qtd. in Pykett, 380), a crime a contemporary pamphlet identifies as “committing rapine and sodomy” (“Arraignment”). One might wonder why this reviewer would believe the novel’s readers would recognize such an obscure allusion, except that it wasn’t so obscure. Notes the scholar Rictor Norton, “the trial . . . would remain the legal precedent for all homosexual court cases for the next two hundred years. It was a sensation, and pamphlets describing it were reprinted every time there was a gay scandal during the next two centuries.” The term “Audley,” then, might have signaled readers about the nature of the relationship between Robert Audley and George Talboys. Readers might also have remembered that in 1844, a different Lord Audley was acquitted for murder by reason of insanity (Pykett 380), both these instances adding a bloody background to Audley Court that deepens the novel’s sensational atmosphere of illegality and violence and dark mystery.

Braddon likely chose the name Audley Court, rather than, say, Audley Hall or Audley Manor, because of its several meanings: 1) its regal sense, with Lady Audley reigning over the court; 2) its legal sense, with Lady Audley being unofficially tried and sentenced here; 3) and its romantic sense, with Lady Audley having been courted by Sir Michael. As Gail Turley Houston explains, “Critiquing the court system and courting as constituted in the nineteenth century, the setting places the reader in the position of ‘going to the [Audley] Court,’ which refers both to legal and domestic spheres” (21). And perhaps “Audley” was chosen for its near homonyms–the house is run by a person who doesn’t quite fit in, a Lady “oddly,” if you will. Additionally, the house’s chaotic design, with its suggestion of the cruel illogic of patriarchy, helps us see the pretense of and the consequences of maintaining an “orderly” court.

Presumably, Braddon combined Ingatestone and Skisdon to draw upon features of both, the Gothic forebodingness and privilege of the former and the architectural mélange of the latter. Perhaps that’s why she describes Audley Court, in a seeming contradiction, as both “a glorious old place—a place that visitors are in rapture with” and “a noble place, a house in which you incontinently lost yourself” (8). Braddon emphasizes the house’s mishmash of styles and features, large and small, strong and fragile, old and modern. The house is an accretion of pieces added over time with little sense of logic or coherence. This perception is reinforced by its interior:  It is “a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the furthest” (8). This description, reminiscent of the labyrinthine passageways common to Gothic fiction, conveys a sense of the uncanny, of something that can’t be understood by rational investigation (much as the novel’s plot meanders yet returns at its conclusion to this opening setting).

Additionally, in charting the house’s roots through British history, from its current state in the 1850s back to the early 1700s of the Hanoverian reign to the 15 and 1600s of the Tudors to the 1200s through 1400s of the Plantagenets to the Conquest of 1066 and even further (she refers to the house’s “eleven centuries,” which would place its foundation at some time in the 800s, when the Anglo-Saxons were struggling against Viking raids and Beowulf was being composed), she’s doing more than describing shifting architectural styles; she’s suggesting the persistence across centuries of elite—and especially male—rule. On this reading, the contradictory nature of the house’s architecture and its confoundingly mazelike interior—suggest the illogic of this rule. That when trying to penetrate the house’s mysteries you are “led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the furthest” suggests this mystery—this male rule—is both inexplicable and inescapable.

But we’re left with the question: if much of the original of this house is based on Skisdon Lodge in Cornwall, why did Braddon set the novel in Essex? The answer is simple. Her narrative requires characters to make frequent trips by train from Audley Court to London. Ingatestone is 25 miles from London, nowadays a 28-minute trip by rail.

St. Kew in Cornwall, on the other hand, is 214 miles from London, currently a four-hour train ride and a much longer trip in the 19th century; Wolff describes how Braddon’s mother, with her children, traveled to Skisdon: “By railway to Southampton, thence by coach to Exeter, and on, the next morning, to Wadebridge, where Grandmamma’s carriage would meet them” (30).

Braddon was so fond of this home that after the commercial success of her first novels, in 1867, she purchased Skisdon, but its distance from London made living there impractical. As Wolff relates, “never able to use the house she soon resold it to a Braddon cousin” (141).

Skisdon was again for sale in 2014. Its online real estate brochure tells buyers that Skisdon consists of five holiday apartments which one can “easily revert back into a sensational single-family home,” a total of fourteen bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and “almost 2 acres of enchanting & historic gardens & grounds” (Savills). The brochure adds an additional selling point: “During 1866, the house came into the ownership of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the sensational novelist of ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’. It is understood that she entertained fellow novelist and friend Charles Dickens at Skisdon” (Savills). Despite her recent critical acclaim, it seems, mention of Dickens’s having once been entertained at Skisdon is as much a selling point as (or more than) Braddon’s ownership of it.

By the end of Lady Audley’s Secret, Audley Court has become a bleak house: it is “shut up, and a grim housekeeper reigns paramount” while “blue mould . . . gathers” (379). This ruin anticipates the fates of many large English country houses in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th. The decline of the aristocracy often led to the sale of, the reduction of, the repurposing of, and even the destruction of these mansions. As David Cannadine notes, “neither private nor institutional purchasers could absorb all the country houses coming on to the market, especially those that were very large and very remote, and sooner or later, many were inevitably destroyed.” Cannadine cites 79 mansions destroyed between 1870 and 1919, 221 between 1920 and 1939 (119).

But the two houses Audley Court is based on have had happier fates. Ingatestone Hall, rented out in the 1860s, parts of it used as a girl’s high school in the 1940s and as the Essex Country Records office in the 1950s (“Ingatestone” [Wikipedia]), is now “primarily a private [Petre] family residence but . . . The public rooms and grounds may be hired for. . . .  receptions & dinners, lectures & seminars, concerts and plays, trade promotions & corporate events, garden parties, fairs & exhibitions and film locations” (“Ingatestone”). Skisdon Lodge, also a private residence, is not open to the public. In 1968, it was “loosely divided in order to create five self-contained self-catering apartments in addition to the owner’s residence” (Savills). Perhaps Skisdon has been returned to a single-family residence by its new owners with the money they had remaining after having purchased it for a mere £1.35 million (Smellie).

While her former home is worth a fortune, the fate of Braddon’s fiction has not been so fortunate, despite the  laudable efforts of literary scholars. Thus, Jude James, writing in 2018 about “the pioneering author who helped shape Lyndhurst” (with the 1888 construction of her country home Annesley), points out that Braddon is “strangely little known today . . . with only one of her books currently to be found on booksellers’ shelves.” And while houses with only conjectural connections to Jane Austen use her as a main selling point, Ingatestone Hall—that haunting home at the heart of her best known novel—doesn’t mention Braddon at all.

Works Cited

“”The Arraignment and Conviction of Mervin Lord Audley, Earle of Castlehaven.” London, 1643. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, 2011, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A75604.0001.001, accessed 07 Oct. 2022.

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862. Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.

Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Vintage, 1999.

Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington. Memoirs of an Author. London: R. Bently and Son, 1895. Internet Archive,  https://archive.org/details/cu31924104096692/.

Fletcher, Robert W. “Mary Elizabeth Braddon.” Nov. 2012, https://issuu.com/fryerningfolio/docs/meb-text.

“History of Ingatestone.” History House, 2022, https://historyhouse.co.uk/placeI/essexi01d.html. 

Houston, Gail Turley. “Braddon’s Commentaries on the Trials and Legal Secrets of Audley Court.” Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, edited by Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie. SUNY Press, 2000, pp. 17-30.

“Ingatestone Hall.” Ingatestone House. https://www.ingatestonehall.com/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2022.

“Ingatestone Hall.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 May 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingatestone_Hall.

“Ingatestone Hall Clock.” Essex Chronicle, 16 May  1930, p. 9.

James, Jude. “Reflections: Mary Elizabeth Braddon–Pioneering Author Who Helped Shape Lyndhurst.” New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times, 15 Nov. 2018, https://www.advertiserandtimes.co.uk/people/reflections-mary-elizabeth-braddon-pioneering-author-who-helped-shape-lyndhurst-9154395/.

Langland,, Elizabeth. “Enclosure Acts: Framing Women’s Bodies in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, edited by Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie. SUNY Press, 2000, pp. 3-16.

“North Lees Hall.” Peak District National Park, 17 Mar. 2016, https://www.peakdistrict.gov.uk/visiting/places-to-visit/stanage-and-north-lees/north-lees-hall.

Norton, Rictor. “The Trial of Mervyn Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, 1631.” Gay History and Literature, 8 Aug. 2009, https://rictornorton.co.uk/touchet.htm. 

“Pemberley Walk at Lyme.” National Trust, 6 Mar. 2016,  https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/lyme/trails/pemberley-walk-at-lyme-.

“Pride and Prejudice.” Chatsworth House, 1 Mar. 2017, https://www.chatsworth.org/news-media/chatsworth-on-film/pride-and-prejudice/.

Pykett, Lynn. Explanatory Notes. Lady Audley’s Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Oxford, 2012, pp. 380-96.

“Regency Afternoon Tea.” Wentworth Woodhouse, https://wentworthwoodhouse.org.uk/whats-on/regency-afternoon-tea/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2022.

Savills, plc. “Skisdon,” https://media.onthemarket.com/properties/779835/doc_1_0.pdf.  

Shea, Christopher D. “England to Restore a House with Ties to Jane Austen — or Not.” New York Times, 25 Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/books/jane-austen-society-british-government-wentworth-woodhouse.html.

Smellie, Alice. “A Cornish Classic: It Was Once Home to a Victorian Lady of Letters . . . Now It’s Become a Warren of Elegant Holiday Lettings.” The Daily Mail (London): 29 Sep. 2014, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2533790/A-Cornish-classic-home-Victorian-lady-letters-warren-elegant-holiday-lettings.html.

Steiner, Hazel. “Ingatestone Hall.” 20 June 2018. hazelstainer.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/ingatestone-hall/.

“The Story of the House.” Ingatestone House. https://www.ingatestonehall.com/about-us/history. 

Syal, Rajiv and Sian Cain. “’No Evidence’ Jane Austen Ever Went to Stately Home Mentioned in Autumn Statement.” The Guardian, 23 Nov. 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/23/jane-austen-inspiration-receives-76m-funding-in-autumn-statement-wentworth-woodhouse.

Wilde, E.E. Ingatestone and the Essex Great Road with Fryerning. London: H. Milford, Oxford Univ.  Press, 1913. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/ingatestoneande00wildgoog.

Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian: The Life & Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Garland, 1979.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxpO6eRs9FQ