Gentle Readers who love to travel, especially those who love to follow in Jane Austen’s Footsteps:  I am linking to this post by Nan Quick, one of our JASNA members from New Hampshire.  She had emailed me recently to tell me of her website for armchair travelers, with one of her posts on Jane Austen’s Bath … I append it here – with lovely pictures and lively commentary, how perfect to visit such a place as this, when so many of us are snowed-in! So with dreams of warmer climes and Jane Austen hovering nearby, here you go…

I really wanted to call this Armchair Traveler Chapter “Jane Austen’s Bath.” But holding forth about Jane’s bathing habits would have given me ammunition for a brief and not very interesting article. So, instead it’ll be “Jane Austen AND Bath.” I’ll try to describe the City as it was during the times when she lived there, and I’ll show you many of the locations that she used in two of her books. Happily, the built world of today’s Bath is largely unchanged from Jane’s time. Over the past two centuries the City’s fame has protected it from indiscriminate “improvements,” and so visiting Bath today gives a fairly good impression of what Jane’s days there might have been like.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re Austen-informed, and have thus read NORTHANGER ABBEY and PERSUASION, which are called Austen’s Bath novels.

On May 28th, 2011 I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon in Bath. Of course, in England, the weather has a mind of its own, and storms from a place called “Bill’s Mother’s” descended. Here’s how it is with Bill: the locals always say bad weather is blown in from a mythical place called “Bill’s Mother’s.” I thought you should know, just in case you go to Bath and people start talking weather. On that Saturday my British friends and I were rained upon, blown about, and generally frozen; late May felt like early March. But I’d asked Anne and David and Janet (who you’ve met in my earlier Armchair Traveler pieces) to make the long round-trip drive on the traffic-jammed M5 with me from the Midlands down to Bath, expressly so I could make the following words REAL to myself:

“The Crescent,” “Milsom Street,” “Pulteney Street,” “The Pump Yard.” I also wanted to clear my confusion, once and for all, about all those infernal ROOMS that Austen’s characters scurried between: the Upper Rooms, or the New Assembly Rooms; the Lower Rooms; and the Pump Room. Even though my time there was short, and the weather awful, I managed to get a sense of the lay of the land, which is what I’d like to share with you.

Continue reading…

[Images from Nan Quick.com]

Nan has also written a post on CONTEMPLATING THE GENIUS OF PLACE, & THE PLACES OF GENIUSES —

• Liverpool (Gormley, McCartney, Lennon) ;
• The Ruins at Witley Court ;
• and ending with Chawton and Jane Austen’s House

This is a long post, so if Jane is your only interest, then scroll through it to the end – but I advise you see read the whole thing – I was in a Liverpool a few years ago and it was very nice to re-live that trip – so thank you Nan!