"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819. It follows a man in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up twenty years later, having missed the American Revolution. Written while Irving was living in Birmingham, England, it is part of a collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Although the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains, Irving later admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills." The story's title character is a Dutch-American villager living around the time of the American Revolutionary War.
The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London.