The time setting for Pride and Prejudice spans approximately two years and is contemporary to the time of Austen’s writing, which was a tumultuous period in British history marked by revolutions overseas and unrest in Britain. With the American Revolution having commenced in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789, Britain was engaged in significant conflicts that lasted almost two decades and caused great financial instability. Austen would have known a sense of an impending invasion by Napolean’s forces, since her brother Henry served in the militia. The start of industrialisation in England brought further unrest. Compared to the gentility portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, many underprivileged classes lived on the brink of starvation and there was widespread fear that the livelihoods of skilled workers were under threat. Protests lead by Luddites (in modern usage, a derogatory term referring to a person opposed to new technologies), which involved the smashing of industrial machinery, sparked fears of a revolution on British soil and led to strong government reaction that included limits on freedom of speech. In 1811, George, Prince of Wales, took the role of Regent of England (or proxy king) after his father, King George III, was deemed unwell due to illness and until George IV was crowned. A positive outcome from this was that it was a time of development in the arts and sciences, fields of which the Prince Regent was a strong supporter, which may have contributed to Austen’s inspiration to write.

Austen’s novel depicts the story of the gentry social class at the turn of nineteenth century England. The gentry were the upper class, whose principal concerns were property, money and status, with the most influential gentry being the landed gentry, or those who owned land, especially large country estates, such as Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy. Although only owning a small estate, the Bennets are still considered gentry, however, because Mrs Bennet’s father was a lawyer, which was considered a low-status job at the time, the Bennets are positioned lower in status to the Bingleys and Darcys, who are again lower in status to the aristocratic Lady Catherine.

Complicating life further for the Bennets was a practice known as ‘entailing’ that had been established during Austen’s period, which concentrated and enlarged wealth through consolidating and extending estates only inheritable by male children or male relatives. For the Bennets, this meant that rather than being able to leave the family estate to Elizabeth and her sisters upon his death, Mr Bennet would have to pass Longbourn to his cousin, Mr Collins, essentially leaving the fate of the Bennet daughters to the mercy of suitable marriages. This makes Pride and Prejudice also a story of gender conflict and, despite women like Mary Wollstonecraft fighting for the equal rights of women, the reality was that women were still principally focused on securing profitable marriages in order to maintain or improve their social position and family’s status. In Elizabeth Bennet, Austen succinctly presents an example of an intelligent yet conflicted woman at the turn of the nineteenth century, intellectually and morally independent, yet still reliant upon marriage to ensure her financial survival.

Austen does not devote a lot of description to the physical settings in the novel, other than Mr Darcy’s Pemberley estate where the setting takes on a particular significance for Elizabeth in terms of what it reveals about the male protagonist, Mr Darcy. Physical settings in the novel include both real places in England, such as London, Hertfordshire, Brighton and Derbyshire, and fictional places, such as Longbourn, Netherfield, Meryton, Pemberley, Rosings, and Hunsford. Primarily, the novel is set in Longbourn, the Bennets’ estate, which is located in the rural neighbourhood of Hertfordshire, near the town of Meryton. Rented by the wealthy Mr Bingley, the larger Netherfield estate is also located in Hertfordshire. The county is portrayed as a small and gossipy town where the behaviours of others are frequently commented upon, such as Mr Bingley’s comings and goings and the people with whom he associates. Rosings, in Kent county, is where Mr Collins occupies a parsonage, while Derbyshire is where Mr Darcy lives on the vast Pemberley estate. While some of the events of the novel occur in London, 24 miles from Longbourn, and in the seaside town of Brighton, these are only referenced but not directly shown.