This year marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and Bath is gearing up to celebrate. While it’s no secret that the iconic writer had a certain disdain for the city in her few years living here, Andrew Swift trails her movements and discovers the paths she crossed…
James Joyce once said that if Dublin suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed out of Ulysses. For some, Jane Austen’s two Bath novels – Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – seem to hold a similar promise, the prospect of recreating the manners and mores of Regency Bath – so much so, that, every September, hordes of Janeites descend on the city to attempt to do just that. And this year, the 250th anniversary of her birth, the celebrations are starting early.
While the enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s novels may seem, to the casual observer, largely due to nostalgia for a more elegant age, a more likely reason is the vividness and immediacy of her immersive descriptions. This is not just because of the restless, mercurial energy of her writing. Her characters spend much of their time bustling about, bumping into each other in the street, catching sight of each other across crowded rooms or glimpsing each other through shop or carriage windows. When they do step into a drawing room, the conversation twists and turns at breakneck speed.
Jane Austen, it is sometimes claimed, hated Bath because all she wanted was a quiet life in the country, left to get on with her writing. But, while she undoubtedly needed time alone, she not only relished company – the livelier the better – she also loved dancing, followed the latest fashions and was never happier than when out shopping or walking in convivial company. So, while she would have hated the snobbery and pomposity so prevalent in Regency Bath, in so many other ways she would have revelled in it.
Her novels, it is true, are littered with characters happy to stay quietly at home, shunning company. This, though, is never portrayed as an admirable or enviable trait. The characters the reader is led to identify with – despite their flaws and foibles – yearn to get out into the world and make their mark. And that was very much what Jane wanted to do. In Bath, she loathed the ‘elegant stupidity of private parties’; her milieu was the Assembly Rooms, the theatre or Sydney Gardens.
Unfortunately, although she lived in Bath for almost five years and visited on other occasions, we know virtually nothing about what she did during her time here. The little we do know comes from letters she wrote to her sister Cassandra, and, as Cassandra was with her in Bath for most of the time, these cover only three very brief periods – a month or so in the spring of 1799, three weeks in the spring of 1801 and a couple of weeks in April 1805.
Although the 1799 visit was her first recorded visit to Bath, she had already written much of Northanger Abbey, which displays an intimate knowledge of the city, by this time. The letters she wrote to Cassandra on that visit, when she lodged with her mother and brother Edward at 13 Queen Square, also reveal a familiarity with several of the people she encounters.
On her next recorded visit, in May 1801, she and her mother stayed with James and Jane Leigh Perrot, her uncle and aunt, at 1 The Paragon. He was on the Assembly Rooms management committee, she was a Barbadian plantation heiress, and both were fond of the ‘stupid parties’ she so much despised. As the family had decided to move to Bath, she and her mother were house-hunting, and her letters describe houses viewed and deemed unsuitable, including one in Green Park (too damp) and one in New King Street (too small).
No 4 Sydney Place, where the family eventually settled, was the best of best worlds – one of the newest and most elegant addresses in Bath, yet on the edge of the country. The lack of surviving letters from this period, however, means that, to all intents and purposes, Jane disappears from view. How often she visited Sydney Gardens, which lay just across the road, is unknown, and, although her social life was undoubtedly as frenetic as that described in her earlier letters, it will forever remain a mystery.
When the lease of 4 Sydney Place ran out in 1804, the family moved to Green Park Buildings East, where her father died the following January. Deprived of his income as Rector of Steventon, the family were forced to downsize, moving first to 25 Gay Street and then to an unknown address in unfashionable Trim Street, which, in June 1806, they left, in Jane’s words, ‘for Clifton, with what happy feelings of escape!’
This remark is often taken to indicate her detestation of Bath, but seems more likely to reflect concern over her family’s reduced circumstances and uncertain future.
While we may regret the lack of information about Jane Austen’s time in Bath, in some ways it is an advantage. If she had left a detailed account of her sojourn in the city, we would inevitably read her Bath novels through the prism of that knowledge. As it is, we have little to go on but the novels themselves, in which she distilled her experience, coming up with such seemingly innocent but slyly sarcastic sallies as this, from Northanger Abbey: ‘A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.’ She also crafted many memorable evocations of the city, such as her description, in Persuasion, of a drive along Southgate and Stall Streets on a rainy afternoon, ‘amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newspapermen, muffin-men and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens’.
She seems to have had something of a penchant for rain. Writing to Cassandra after arriving in Bath in May 1801, she complained that, ‘the first view of Bath in fine weather does not answer my expectations; I think I see more distinctly through rain. The sun was got behind everything, and the appearance of the place from the top of Kingsdown was all vapour, shadow, smoke and confusion.’
Although this may sound more like the observation of a general looking down on a battlefield than the remark of a young woman surveying the most fashionable city in England, it is consistent with the portrayal of Bath in her novels, where treachery and deceit abound, and the pursuit of pleasure needs always to be tempered by vigilance.
Today, we can still tread the streets which served as a backdrop to the intrigues played out in Jane Austen’s novels. That these intrigues were set amid such glorious settings – and by characters clad in Regency costume – no doubt lends them an added piquancy. But, in the end, it is the novels themselves and their unflinching depiction of the cut and thrust of social interactions, betrayals and hard-won triumphs that really matter.
Andrew Swift and Kirsten Elliot are running a walk and talk through Bath, revealing some of the lesser-known corners of the city. Arrive: 10.30am, £16.99 with On Foot in Bath book; toppingbooks.co.uk
