Home sweet Wickham?

In the English county of Hampshire, some forty miles from the village where Jane Austen was born exactly 250 years ago, a new planned community is rising. Dedicated to environmental sustainability (heat pumps, EV chargers, ample green space) and the principles of new urbanism (walkable layout, community center, nearby schools), the garden village of Welborne sounds like it will be a delightful place to live.

To earn free publicity for this enterprise, the builder of some of the homes in Welborne is celebrating Austen’s 250^th with a creative writing competition. “Tell a fictional story about your first day in a new Welborne home,” the Instagram account of Pye Homes urges—but be sure to incorporate “some of the icons from the Welborne development, which include a fern leaf, bumblebee, butterfly, and bluebell.”

Under-16s (“Jane’s Juniors”) must submit 500 to 750 words, while older writers (“Austen’s Apprentices”) have a 750-to-1,000 word limit. Entries are due by Monday, and prizes include books, bookstore gift vouchers, and tickets to Chawton House.

All well and good, but one claim in the Pye Homes press release pulled me up short: “The new Welborne development. . . has dedicated many of its home types to Jane Austen’s most popular characters, including George Wickham and Colonel Fitzwilliam from Pride and Prejudice, with more to come in the development’s next phase.”

You will immediately detect a problem: George Wickham and Colonel Fitzwilliam wouldn’t crack the top ten on any conceivable list of Jane Austen’s most popular characters. And if you investigate further, another difficulty arises: It’s not clear that any of the home types announced so far has anything whatsoever to do with Austen.

It’s true that Pye Homes has a “Wickham” model (“3-bedroom semi-detached. . . blending classic red-brick charm with modern living”), but a note on its floor plan connects the name, not to Austen’s sociopathic seducer of teenage girls, but rather to a nearby village where the fourteenth-century churchman William of Wykeham was born. No sign of a “Fitzwilliam” model anywhere, as far as I could see.

A second Welborne builder is offering a three-bedroom model called The Wentworth (scroll down), but it’s part of a series with names like The Blenheim, The Cavendish, and The Pembroke, which suggests to me that the theme is aristocratic pedigrees, rather than swoony self-made captains. And while Welborne will have a neighborhood called Dashwood, it’s named for a nearby forest (see p. 14), not a struggling family of bereaved women.

On the other hand, “Welborne” is exactly what Austen matriarchs from Lady Catherine to Lady Russell want their sons-in-law to be. Perhaps Hampshire’s next planned community should be called “And Also Rich.”