The country house holds a very glamorous reputation in the public imagination. Inhabited by impossibly refined individuals and decorated with museum-quality art, the public-at-large has a near obsession with the English country house and its rituals. While Americans are often charged with being the worst offenders of country house worship, the fascination with the comfortable “hygge” of the English squirearchy dates back centuries. While Napoleon lambasted the English as a nation of shopkeepers, the Parisian emigrees of the ancien regime marveled at how Londoners “washed their houses inside and out” and were green with envy at the Count of Provence’s spacious country house in Buckinghamshire. The German aristocracy was equally taken with the country lifestyle in Britain. The last German Emperor, spoilt by country weekends with his grandmother Queen Victoria, briefly entertained the idea of retiring to England in abdication before the severity of the armistice became clear.

While a few British families built country houses on a grand scale, especially towards the end of the Victorian Age, such as Lord Rothschild’s house at Waddesdon Manor (1877) and the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Hall (1880), the majority of country houses were large and practical houses that were designed with estate management in mind before any other concerns. This consisted of a main house or “big house”, in which the estate owner lived, a stable block for horses, estate cottages for tenant farmers, various outbuildings and, occasionally, a dower house. In particularly grand estates, the dower house was sometimes the old manor house, but in many cases they were purpose-built or taken from whatever “good” quality house was available on the estate.

Not everyone could afford a dower house and not everyone wanted to live in the big house. George V famously occupied York House, to the constant complaint of his wife Queen Mary, because he felt he could not evict his mother, Queen Alexandra, from her house. He also secretly enjoyed York House’s rambling rooms and a respite from court, although he was so duty-bound that he could never quite bring himself to admit it according to James Pope-Hennessey’s biography of Queen Mary. The Royal Family hated York Cottage, with the then-Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) remarking on the peculiarity of having almost every room the same size from the bathroom to the bedroom, but as the paterfamilias King George V had the last word.

Of course, in the reign of George II, only a few power houses had been built. The apogee of the enormous “Downton Abbey” country house would come later, beginning in the reign of the Prince Regent and ending with the death of Edward VII. A few major country houses would be built after this date, such as Sir Philip Sassoon’s country houses at Trent Park and Port Lympne and Sir Winston Churchill’s ruinously expensive house at Chartwell (for more see “No More Champagne” by David Lough), but all of these buildings were purely constructed for pleasure rather than estate management. A true country house, which could sit on hundreds if not thousands of acres, was a home, an office and working business. Aside from agriculture, some estates specialized in mining or textiles, while others in fisheries or even transit: manorial rights entitling the “lord of the manor” – who is not a “lord” in the conventional sense of a peer, but rather a “landlord” with no title – were ancient rights to certain things such as roads, land sales, hunting, and could be extremely lucrative. All of these variables dictated what would be built and where, a construction regime that was especially pragmatic under the early Georgians.

You’ve laid out a very specific scenario so let’s take them one by one since some of your questions are speculative.

My father has just passed and as his firstborn, I've inherited his country estate. He is survived by his wife (my mother) and his sons and daughter.

You would be very young indeed then. Your marriage would more than likely be arranged and, as a cash poor squire, you would be looking for a “good match” financially more than love. Indeed, this may have even been decided shortly after the time of your birth. Women past the age of 24 were considered to be spinsters, although matches could be made as late as 29 if the woman in question was particularly rich. This was not an age of delayed marriage, nor were there any advantages to remaining so without a large amount of money: the plight of the Regency-era spinster was a serious affair. They would remain under your care and protection at your cost, unless you turned them out in which case they would be beholden to other families as companions and, possibly, girls’ governesses if well-educated by the mores of the day.

I find my mother a bit overbearing, particularly about me finding a wife. Assuming she has relatives of rank, would she move to be with them, say a sister, or would I be obliged to maintain her at my household?

This is too speculative point to authoritatively answer, but this could happen in rare circumstances. As the paterfamilias you would be expected to care for your entire family and your father would have taken provisions to make this happen. You would, in all likelihood, face significant local scorn for casting your mother out of your household. As a widower, she may also have significant financial power from her own dowry, or additional property she possesses in her own right too.

All of these specific events are good fodder for Dickens novels.

If I have younger brothers, at what point are they expected to leave my residence?

There were a handful of professions available to younger sons that were memorialized in a rhyme: “The Army or the Navy, the Church or the Law, and the nobility, which does nothing at all.” As the eldest son, you would of course be expected to look after your interests on your estate, but your father would have likely created a path for your brothers in one of these institutions. The army worked on the basis of a purchase commission, which allowed officers to buy-in at a certain rank and then “cashier out” at the end of their careers. This buy-in formed a pension for military officers, but the army was also the most expensive of these paths as pay was low and gentlemen were expected to front the cost for everything. The Royal Navy was much more lucrative for gentlemen with no means, while the Church could be a decent option if your connections were good – if not your brother could end up a relatively poor parish priest living in “genteel poverty”. Lawyers required expensive training but could likewise make an enormous amount of money if they had good business sense.

Medicine is occasionally included in this convention, but doctors were not really respected in the way they are today until the reign of Edward VII.

Would I be obligated (or expected) to sell a portion of the estate to provide a larger inheritance for them?

You would actually be forbidden from doing so. Your estate would be passed onto you in entail, meaning that you do not own it, but rather your (unborn) children own it. You could theoretically mortgage it or manipulate it in a number of ways, but you could not sell it. Entails lasted for three generations before they had to be renewed.

I'm relatively concerned about my sister's ability to find a husband, having neither the looks nor the dowry to entice a suitor to take her off my hands. Would I be obliged to maintain her and cover her expenses?

Yes. Approximately one in six women never married, but the majority had no issue in finding a partner. Dowries could come in any number of ways and sometimes they were not very large at all. Hester Piozzi was married to the enormously rich Henry Thrale a few years after the death of George II and had virtually no dowry at all, but she was pretty and young and her family ancient and well-connected, which more than made up for a lack of resources at hand. Thrale needed a young wife with a good pedigree to advance in society, and Piozzi needed a rich husband who would look beyond her limited means. After his death she spurned Dr. Johnson’s advances to marry a penniless Italian nobleman who worked in London as a musician. Rich through her own hard work and assisted by Dr. Johnson’s lyrical salesmanship (“Gentlemen, we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the dreams of avarice.”), Hester developed an independent and happy life once she sold Thrale’s brewery and began writing on her own.

She even built her own country house with her last husband, to whom she remained devoted until her death in 1821.

/u/alexistheman has given you an excellent answer. I would just like to supplement it with a bit more information specifically about inheritance from a previous answer of mine on the subject:

It was in the best interest of the family - as a continuous entity connected to the male bloodline - to keep property as consolidated as possible by protecting it from the individuals that made up the family, which they did through a complex legal process called the strict settlement.

In English law, you were not allowed to create a perpetual entail - to say "this property can only be inherited on the male line, forever and ever". But by the late seventeenth century, large landholders came up with a way around this by giving their sons a life interest in their estates but ultimately leaving them in trust to their (often not yet even born) grandsons; when the grandsons came of age or married and wanted an income, their fathers would then have them agree to a settlement in which they would also take a life interest in the estates when their fathers died and would leave them whole to their own sons or other specific collateral male heirs in exchange for an income during their fathers' lifetimes. The process would usually repeat in each generation and was usually agreeable for both parties.

In addition to laying out the disposition of the estate, settlements would usually detail what the other siblings would inherit (or really, be given by the son after the father died) as well as what the widow would receive and what rents he could collect; when the settlement was made at the time of the marriage, the bride's father and his lawyers would also be heavily involved to decide what her jointure would be (that is, what amount of money would devolve on her when she was widowed) and how much pin money she would be given regularly, as well as how her children apart from the oldest son would inherit - although these could be increased in the final will if the man had saved a personal estate in his adult life. Property that was held, given, bought, or sold outside of a settlement was owned "in fee" or "in fee simple" and the owner could do what they liked with it, but property that was settled couldn't be mortgaged, couldn't be split up and sold, and couldn't (generally) be inherited mostly by a female descendant who would marry and take it out of the family.

On the other hand, some preferred not having a settlement because it gave the individual father more power. If he preferred one child to the others, he could leave them more money in his will, or if his wife had been unfaithful he could cut her out entirely and make her dependent on their children.

So what happened before Pride and Prejudice began is that Mr. Bennet signed a contract with his father, probably on his marriage to Mrs. Bennet, that prevented him from touching the roughly £50,000 capital (likely invested in government funds at 4% or so) so that it could be passed whole to his male heir, and assigned Mrs. Bennet a jointure, as well as incomes for any daughters and likely non-inheriting sons, the daughters getting £100 a year once they're married while he's alive, and of course £50 a year after he dies - this was meant to be a sweetener on top of a dowry, which would have had to be saved in Mr. Bennet's personal estate from out of his income, but the problem is that saving for five dowries (which were meant to be more than the father's annual income, as much as three times higher) would have been impossible. The Bennets didn't like this situation and planned to break the entail once they had a son and cooperative male heir - since an uncooperative one would need to be paid off to agree to it, and as just noted, Mrs. Bennet had no savings - but of course they never did. Meanwhile, Sir Lewis de Bourgh's father evidently did not choose to go with a strict settlement, according to Lady Catherine, which allowed the title to go to the next male heir but the property in fee to be left to his wife, or possibly his daughter (with a life interest for his widow).

I want to point specifically up to the bolded line - there was generally a provision enshrined in the marriage settlement stating exactly what sort of income and property the wife would be entitled to when she was widowed. It is therefore quite possible that her jointure includes a residence of some kind where she will choose to live in order to be in control of her own household.