For sale

Few pastimes give me as much pleasure as the ogling of unaffordable real estate. It’s a bonus when said real estate has Jane Austen connections, as do two properties that came on the market recently:

* It’s rare that precious items get cheaper and cheaper, but that’s what seems to be happening to Luckington Court, the twenty-acre estate in southern England that played Longbourn, the Bennet family home, in the BBC’s famed 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

In 2017, the estate—eight-bedroom/seven-bathroom house, additional one-bedroom apartment, stable block, dove cote, rose garden, fruit trees—went on the market for £9 million (about $12 million in today’s money). Rumors swirled that Prince Harry and his bride-to-be, Meghan Markle, were considering the purchase.

But the Sussexes apparently passed, and no one else was interested either, even after the price came down to a mere £5.75 million ($7.6 million). Since 2018, Luckington has resurfaced repeatedly, cycling through several different real estate agencies, with asking prices of £6 million (2022), £5 million (2024), and now just under £4 million ($5.3 million).

It’s hard to know what’s wrong with the place: the pictures certainly make it look appealing (natural light! Hardwood floors! Exquisite crown molding!) but, then, that’s what you pay real estate agents for.

Whatever the reason for its unpopularity, at this rate, Luckington Court may soon become affordable enough to breathe new life into one of my favorite wacky Janeite ideas--the plan by Canadian lawyer/fanfic writer Tara Rout to crowd-fund a purchase and turn the house into a venue for Austen-themed weddings and tourism.

In 2018, Rout raised less than $20,000 toward the purchase, via a pie-in-the-sky Kickstarter appeal. But back then she needed to raise $8 million! Luckington Court is so much more affordable now! (Although maybe it's found a buyer after all--in the past week, the listing seems to have vanished from the internet, so we Austenian real estate truffle-hounds will have to stay tuned. . . )

* Perhaps, however, you don’t want to blow your millions on a house with a merely fictional Austen link. Perhaps you’re in the market for something real.

In that case, you may want to take a look at Brittains Farm, in the southeastern English town of Sevenoaks, an eighteenth-century farmhouse once owned by Francis Motley Austen, a first cousin of Jane Austen’s father, George. (Curiously, the Austen connection goes unmentioned in the real estate agent’s listing and brochure--the latter of which seems, curiously, to have vanished since I consulted it last week.)

Although Brittains Farm was part of the Kippington estate, which Francis Motley Austen acquired in 1796, he lived in the far grander Kippington House (now an apartment block, according to archivist and architectural historian Nicholas Kingsley). So I will grant that the Austen connection, while real, is on the wispy side.

Judging from the photos, Brittains Farm, while pleasant, is far less palatial than Luckington Court: just six bedrooms, three bathrooms, and 3.4 acres of land, plus the apparently obligatory stables and outbuildings. And the real-estate listing hints at fixer-upper issues, noting, “The house is in need of updating and modernization.”

Nevertheless, the asking price isn’t far different from Luckington Court’s latest: £3.5 million ($4.6 million). Location, location, location?