In the 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth, we’re joining the Georgian city of Bath in celebrating her love of walking, by visiting some of the locations featured in books and film.
‘Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?’ asks an eager young Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Well, as alluded to in Austentatiously Yours, in the February issue of Cotswold Life, the famous author could – at least, she had a ‘complicated’ relationship with the World Heritage City.
Jane visited Bath twice, in 1797 and 1799, and lived here with her parents and beloved sister Cassandra from 1801 to 1806. As a visitor, she rather enjoyed the excitements of England’s premier spa destination, but uprooted in her mid-twenties from her rural Hampshire home when her parents decided to retire here – they felt it could benefit their health – the author was unsettled by the inescapable social round of balls and concerts. She would complain of ‘another stupid party last night’, yet all the while she was squirreling away scenes in her mind to reproduce later, through the prism of her wit and irony, in her novels (she was too distracted while actually living in Bath to write very much).
Jane was at heart a country girl and we find characters throughout her novels sighing for the freedom and peace of the countryside – it has never been simply a modern phenomenon to seek solace in green spaces. The author also loved to walk, and in this 250th anniversary year of her birth, exercising both legs and imaginations to explore in and around Bath is surely the best way to get to know Jane and the two novels that took the city as a major backdrop: Northanger Abbey in which Catherine Morland comes for the season, and Persuasion in which Anne Elliot, after numerous plot twists, gets a second chance at happiness with Captain Wentworth.
Jane Austen audio walking tour, Bath. Photo: Charlotte Harris/austen250.co.uk Gardens and bonnets
Attune yourself in leisurely fashion by following the downloadable Jane Austen Trail around Sydney Gardens, written by author, historian and journalist Diana White. In Jane’s time the Georgian Pleasure Gardens were a great place for promenading, to see and be seen. On a visit in 1799 she wrote to her sister about a forthcoming grand gala with concert, illuminations and fireworks being held here, adding the typically double-edged comment: ‘even the concert will have more than its usual charm for me, as the gardens are large enough for me to get pretty well beyond the reach of its sound’!
Later she reflected: ‘It would be very pleasant to be near Sydney Gardens; we might go into the labyrinth [a maze with a swinging chair at its centre] every day’. And indeed, the family did live just across the road at no. 4 Sydney Place from 1801.
Having got the endorphins gently flowing, step out further, following Visit Bath’s free audio walking tour, In the Footsteps of Jane Austen, which highlights city landmarks and life in Jane’s time, and includes extracts from her novels and letters. The one-and-a-half-hour route begins at Abbey Church Yard and the Pump Room, where in Northanger Abbey, after the ‘health-giving’ waters are sampled, the men discuss politics and the women wander together ‘noticing every new face and almost every new bonnet in the room’.
The audio tour ends at the top of Milsom Street, the fantastic shopping street where Isabella sees ‘the prettiest hat you can imagine’ (Northanger Abbey) and Admiral Croft admits to never being able to pass a particular print shop without stopping (Persuasion). As for Jane, she often went walking on Beechen Cliff, the hill you can see in the distance.
Recently-created Bathscape self-guided walking trails, encouraging people to explore the beautiful natural landscape surrounding the city, would certainly have appealed to Jane – and, rather aptly, the 1.47-mile / 2.37km ‘Walk To Bath’s Best View’ leads steeply up to Beechen Cliff.
It is on a walk to the ‘noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath’ that Catherine Morland, knowing ‘nothing of drawing – nothing of taste’, is given a lecture on art and the picturesque by Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. Her mind whirring with talk of ‘foregrounds, distances, and second distances – side-screens and perspectives – lights and shades […] Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.’ For his part, Henry, ‘delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once’, gently changes the subject.
The whole scene is a masterclass of Austen social comedy and irony, firmly rooted in the Georgian era but humorous to this day. Perhaps a brush with Bathscape would inspire a modern Catherine Morland to regain a holistic appreciation of Bath as a landscape city.
For a less energetic Bathscape trail with an Austen link, try the 1.5-mile / 2.4km flat, wheel-friendly ‘Royal Victoria Park Highlights’, which takes in the Gravel Walk (as does the earlier-mentioned audio tour) running below the Royal Crescent. It’s here that Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth touchingly find themselves reunited in love after ‘so many, many years of division and estrangement’ and are ‘more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their reunion than when it had been first projected’ (Persuasion).
The 2022 Netflix version of Persuasion made good use of Bath’s streetscapes in filming, and many TV and film adaptations of Jane’s novels have taken place in the city and in the wider Cotswolds: from Chavenage House featuring as Randalls, home of Mr and Mrs Weston in Emma (Universal Pictures, 2020), to Dyrham Park cast as Sanditon House in Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon (ITV, 2019). Dyrham Park’s 270 acres of ancient rolling parkland also offer plenty of space to escape should you feel the urge to get away from city hubbub – writing best-selling novels, optional.
Jane Austen’s Bath & Austen 250 celebrations at austen250.co.uk
Bathscape self-guided walking trails at bathscape.co.uk
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