Mansfield Park was published in 1814, a year after Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park itself, the country house estate, is situated in the ‘real’ county of Northumberland, moves to and from Portsmouth, and refers to London and Antigua, among other places. So, rather as for Hardy’s Egdon Heath, Mansfield Park is a nested fictional site within a frame of real counties, country and empire. The real is played off against the ideal through the other place of Portsmouth in the novel; it illuminates Mansfield’s idealism, just as the idealism heightens the harsh reality of Portsmouth. Mansfield is, ‘everything opposite to them here’ [at Portsmouth] (Mansfield Park, p. 367). On the one hand, the maps display Mansfield Park’s overwhelming centrality, demonstrating the extent to which it is a force, agent or character in its own right. At the same time though, the character and narrative focus of Fanny Price as heroine also emerges spatially. The novel as a Bildungsroman tracing Fanny’s development towards a home of her own, is underpinned by this adherence to place.