Jane Austen’s Bath, England

The formal and elegant city of Bath is an exquisite example of a planned  city. If “city” and “jumbled” go together for you, a city as harmonious as Bath will take a bit of getting used to. Built along the Avon river and its gentle slopes, white and cream buildings form grand avenues and crescents beyond the town center and the famous cathedral, Roman Baths, Royal Crescent, and iconic Pulteney Bridge. This is a wedding cake of a city.

Just as famous as the city is the writer who helped make it famous – Jane Austen – who visited many times and lived there from 1801-1806, when it was a highly fashionable destination for the elite of British society. She set many scenes from two of her most famous novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, in various locations around the town.

When in Bath I visited several of Austen’s homes and walked the same streets she would have walked. It was easy to imagine fashionable women in ankle-length dresses and dainty shoes carrying parasols and strolling through the parks. At one of her residences, 4 Sydney Place, Austen reputedly wrote Northanger Abbey while gazing down on Sydney Gardens. Here, balls, supper parties, and musical breakfasts were held.

The town’s pride is reflected in the Jane Austen Center https://www.janeausten.co.uk/as well as at the Parade Gardens, the gateway to the city, where a commemorative flowerbed for Austen was designed to look like an open book and quill. It’s not often we get to walk in a writer’s shoes and have the surrounds be so close to what they were in her day.