In present times, Bath is the city that is most closely associated with Jane Austen. Whether it’s the setting of her books, Austen’s former residences, the Jane Austen Festival, the Jane Austen Centre, or the locations filmed in several Austen adaptations, Bath’s history and modern identity make the city ‘forever Jane’s’. However, Bath has another strong identity: a beautifully preserved Georgian city with a strong Roman past that is buried underneath street level and continues to be archeologically explored and expanded with new discoveries.
In this blogpost, I focus on Bath from a Janeite’s eyes. Read here on my impressions of Bath as a destination in its own right.
We went to Bath for the first time in April 2011. We visited the Jane Austen Centre, and enjoyed tea and sandwiches without requiring advance reservations. Back then, tickets to the Roman Baths included a visit to the Pump Room to take the waters. The Jane Austen Festival in Bath was not the international event that it is today. In fact, I am not certain it existed back then. The Bridgertons were a fictional family just in Julia Quinn’s books and, I’m afraid to admit, I had not heard of them as yet. Bath, back then, was calmer, quieter, visually breathtaking, and yet to commercialize Jane Austen.
We returned to Bath in July 2025, this time as a larger family. This time around the city was energetic, transformed, and eager to celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th birthday.
(More Coming Soon)