Jane Austen came close to penning her bestselling romance novels in Ireland, I am told by my tour guide, Theresa Roche, who is elegantly dressed in a cherry-red Regency costume.
Towards the end of Austen’s romance with her first love, Limerick-born Tom Lefroy, she wrote to her sister that she expected to receive an offer that evening. “But no offer came,” says Roche, of Strictly Jane Austen Tours, as we navigate the cobbled streets of Bath. “If it happened, then she would have no doubt moved to Ireland, and written her novels from there.”
It was a sliding doors moment. Yet the more we retrace Austen’s eventful life in Bath on this spring day, the more I wonder whether enduring favourites such as Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Emma could have been written if she hadn’t lived in Bath, England’s location of choice for socialising and gossip in 1800.
It’s a point that the city itself is not shy of making, especially since 2025 marks 250 years since Austen’s birth.
Bath, an hour’s drive east of Bristol, on the northern tip of Somerset, has a heaving calendar of events in 2025 to celebrate Austen and her work.
The annual Jane Austen Festival is set to hold an elevated edition in September, alongside extended events like two Jane Austen balls in summer and one at Christmas (sign me up for the Sanditon-inspired seaside ball, please). Visiting historians are set to delight audiences with expert talks, and offbeat productions of Austen’s work fill the schedule at the Theatre Royal. There are exhibitions and tours, Regency dance workshops and fashion displays.
They’re all there to support the richest immersive experience of them all: the streets of the city itself.
It’s easy to see why two million people descend upon Bath every year, Jane Austen’s milestone birthday or not. It’s a Unesco World Heritage Site, with Georgian architecture throughout, street after street is pristinely presented with townhouses boasting wrought-iron railings that curl up steps to lunette-decorated entrances, all uniformly spaced out. Limerick and Dublin’s Georgian areas give a hint of what one might expect, but they don’t have the honey-white hue that gives Bath stone such a refined elegance. And nor can they suggest the scale. The Royal Crescent and The Circle – two meticulously kept areas – are shining examples of the style, but whether I mosey down back streets or venture out the centre, the city’s style doesn’t break character.
It’s one of few places in the world that naturally feels like a movie set – up there with Shinjuku in Tokyo, Venice in Italy, and, well, anywhere in New York. And indeed, Bath is rightly synonymous with period dramas, whether adapted from Jane Austen’s writing (Persuasion, Northanger Abbey) or inspired by other works of the imagination (Bridgerton, The Duchess, Vanity Fair).
The walking tour of Bath takes in the city’s myriad filming locations, Austen’s former residences and the places where Bath residents congregated.
That much of Bath was built in the same style speaks of the cash that was being pumped into the city during its heyday in Georgian England, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when foreign holidays were rare. Austen’s adulthood came in tandem with this heyday.
At the time Bath was the epicentre of matchmaking in high-society England. The social season – when the elite would arrive and rent lodgings for weeks or months – ran during spring and summer, and included all the “coming outs”, tea visits and balls that costume dramas have taught us to expect.
Central to this was the Pump Room, once a place to drink the mineral-rich spring waters that gave Bath its name and fame.
In 1799, the same year a 24-year-old Austen first resided here, it was reopened as the dizzyingly-heighted room with its statement chandelier that it is today. It immediately became the place where “every creature in Bath was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours”, as Austen wrote. Key to this was a book that logged the details of eligible new visitors, which was available for all to see – “it was the dating app of its day,” says Roche.
The tradition is played out in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, Austen’s two books that specifically included Bath as a location. Mostly, though, the city’s influence on Austen is implicit – she was a fiction writer, after all.
During her time in Bath, Austen skilfully avoided marriage (she was engaged for one whole evening, before she broke it off the next day). And when her father died in 1805 – when the family lived with their servants in a salubrious townhouse on Green Park Buildings – she, her mother and her remaining unmarried sister lost their income, forcing them to move to smaller and smaller places until they left Bath altogether.
As I promenade around the city on a bustling Saturday, there’s a noticeable rub between the romance of Austen’s great historical settings and their use today. I swing by the townhouse on Queen’s Square where she first stayed, only to find her former residence is a nondescript solicitor’s office. Nearby, under a grand building whose colonnades once sheltered rich sick people as they were carried from Royal Crescent to the thermal baths, is probably the world’s most magnificent Primark. Austen’s address on Gay Street is now a dental surgery. You don’t always need a lot of imagination to envisage the Bath of Jane Austen’s day, but sometimes it helps.
For the most part, the past entwines nicely with the new. The Pump Room is now the setting of a grand, white-table clothed restaurant, where afternoon tea is high on the tick list for Bath activities. At my hotel, the cosy set of interlinked townhouses that is Hotel Indigo, Jane Austen-emblazoned cushions and carpets are in keeping with its Regency kitsch decor. I stay in a “Literary Hideaway” room – complete with writing bureau, book-themed wall art and furnishings, as a nod to the city’s literary history (a couple of doors down from The Jane Austen Centre is Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein, honouring the author who penned the western world’s first sci-fi novel in 1818).
Aside from matchmaking, the healing waters was the city’s other draw in Austen’s time. The Roman Baths is an interactive museum housed on the archaeological site of the complex that been used since AD 70, and is now in various states of repair. Via an audio guide, I’m walked through its many baths of different temperatures, with reconstructions and soft-lit cabinets of findings helping to piece together its story.
Today, the glass-fronted, sprawling Thermae Bath Spa is where couples, hen parties and friends gather to soak their days away, and where I take shelter on my drizzly final day in the city. It is largely indoors but also with an expansive rooftop pool that’s naturally heated to luxuriating temperatures. I’m lulled into believing the cliche: it’ll cure what ails you.
By the time the Austen family’s fading fortunes caused them to leave Bath in 1806, change was in the air. With its sea waters and royal visitors, Brighton began to replace Bath as the elite’s place to see and be seen. Queen’s Square, Austen’s first accommodation in Bath, had quickly turned into a less desirable neighbourhood – enough for Anne Elliot in Persuasion (published in 1817) to insist, “If we do go [to Bath], we must be in a good situation: none of your Queen’s Squares for us!”
But today, the dedicated preservation of Bath coupled with Austen’s immense skill at world-building has given the destination a new lease of life. More than two centueies later, it stands out as a place to transport us to a time in history that’s an endless source of fascination – largely because of Austen herself. Jane Austen’s Bath is a shining example of the right person in the right place at the right time, and grudgingly, not even a glimmer of an Irish residency can change that.
See visitbath.co.uk for more information on visiting Bath and Austen 250. Shilpa Ganatra was a guest of Visit West and Hotel Indigo Bath (bath.hotelindigo.com)
