“Damned Bath.” Jane Austen’s Word
LONDON. "Shadows, steam, smoke and confusion." In four words, a concise review of Bath at the beginning of the nineteenth century . Except that the person expressing these opinions on the spa town founded by the Romans and now a jewel of Georgian architecture was not just any forerunner of Tripadvisor, but Jane Austen , the greatest English writer of her time. Who lived in Bath for five years, from 1801 to 1806, long enough to be considered a jewel in the city's crown. Her contemporaries might not have been too surprised to learn that she didn't like the city at all, but later generations were.
Portrait of Jane Austen (1775-1817)
An exhibition opening in Bath this week, on the 250th anniversary of the birth of the author of Pride and Prejudice , is dispelling this myth with a typically British sense of humour (including the ability to laugh at oneself). Titled The Most Tiresome Place in the World: Jane Austen & Bath , the exhibition at No. 1 Royal Crescent aims to reveal that the writer was not happy with her stay in the city, as evidenced by her letters on the subject. “Bath is world-famous for its association with Jane Austen and I think every local institution, including ours, has benefited from that reputation,” Izzy Wall, the exhibition’s curator, told the Guardian . “But Jane didn’t particularly enjoy living here. She said and wrote a lot of unpleasant things about our city. It was right to bring that aspect of her personality to light too.”
While today's visitors may be charmed by the harmonious style of the period houses - as well as the renowned spa and the atmosphere of this small town of 90,000 people nestled in the green county of Somerset , 180 kilometres west of London - Jane Austen may have had good reason not to like it so much when she first arrived. "It is said that when she heard the news that she and her family were moving to Bath, Jane fainted," says the curator. "How much of this anecdote is an exaggeration we will never know, but there may have been some truth to it. She was forced to leave her idyllic country life to go and live in a city that at the time had little of the glamour. In the early 19th century it was a big city under construction. Every house had a chimney, so it was decidedly smoky . There was no proper sewerage. It was, at least in part, not the best place to live."
One of the autograph letters on display includes a description of Bath as a place of 'vapours, shadows, smoke and confusion'. In another, written a few years after her subsequent move to Chawton , Hampshire , she says she is 'glad to have escaped'. Of course, it was not only the chimneys and the noise that had aroused negative feelings in her: her father fell ill and died during her stay in the city, a great grief for Austen and also a source of financial insecurity for the family. In the five years she spent in Bath , Jane wrote almost nothing, apart from the beginning of a novel called The Watsons (which remained unfinished). However, after leaving Bath she quickly rediscovered her creativity.
This is not to say, the exhibition suggests, that Bath was not a source of literary inspiration for her, as she later used it as a backdrop in two of her other novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey . “But we wanted to reconstruct her real relationship with Bath, a complex relationship, different from how it has long been perceived,” explains the curator. The title of the exhibition is a quote from a dialogue taken from Northanger Abbey , in which one character says to another: “For six weeks, I admit Bath can be pleasant enough, but beyond that it is the dullest place in the world.”
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