Jane Austen in Bath
- Ellen Cheshire
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
In March 2025 a friend and I spent a few days in Bath, as we are both fans of Jane Austen's books we make a pilgrimage to visit the places she lived and visited. One of these was easy to find as we were staying in one! The basement apartment of 4 Sydney Gardens available to rent via AirBnB.
Jane Austen moved with her parents and sister, Cassandra, to Bath in 1801 following her father’s retirement from his parish duties in Steventon, Hampshire. The move was primarily driven by the family's desire for a more leisurely lifestyle in a fashionable city known for its social scene, health benefits and genteel respectability.
Bath was a popular destination for the Georgian gentry, offering entertainment, cultural refinement and therapeutic spa waters. While Austen’s parents embraced the change - after all, it was where they had married - Jane was less enthusiastic; she left behind a quiet rural life she loved and, as her letters suggest, never felt entirely at home in Bath.
During her years in Bath, Jane did relatively little creative writing compared to her earlier and later periods.
The upheaval of the move, the loss of her father in 1805, and an unsettled domestic life left her with little stability or privacy to focus on her craft. However, she is believed to have started - and later abandoned - The Watsons during this time, a novel fragment that explores themes of social status and dependence. Though she made revisions to earlier works like Northanger Abbey, the Bath years were marked more by observation than output, with the city itself leaving a lasting impression that shaped the settings and social dynamics in both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Timeline
April 1764: Rev. George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin’s Church, Walcot, in Bath. It is also where George is buried.
Summer 1797: Jane’s first brief visit when she stayed with the Leigh Perrot family at No. 1 The Paragon.
Summer 1799: Another family visit, staying two months at 13 Queen Square with her brother Edward.
December 1800 – 1804: The family moved permanently after her father’s retirement. They leased 4 Sydney Place, Bathwick.
Jane lived here the longest, describing it fondly in letters, and likely re-wrote Northanger Abbey and worked on The Watsons during this time. Sydney Place is slightly out of town, at the top of Great Pulteney Street, opposite Sydney Gardens, which would have offered some green space and quiet. Also opposite is the Holburne Museum, originally built in the late 1790s as the Sydney Hotel - a fashionable venue for concerts, teas, and garden promenades. Jane would have known the building well. Today, the Holburne is a public art museum, but it has also found new fame on screen: its elegant Palladian façade appears in the Netflix series Bridgerton as the exterior of Lady Danbury’s grand London townhouse.
1804 – 1805: When the lease on Sydney Place ended, they moved to 3 Green Park Buildings East. George Austen died here in 1805. Number 3 was destroyed during the Blitz in 1942, but the mirrored row of houses opposite survive.
1805: After her father died, Jane relocated with her mother and Cassandra to 25 Gay Street. Their apartment is now a dental practice. The Jane Austen Centre is housed just down the road at number 40.
The back rooms of 25 Gay Street overlook the Gravel Walk, a wide gravel-covered walkway that links the Royal Crescent and the Circus with Queen Square, which was romantic promenade which Jane used as the backdrop for Anne and Wentworth’s reunion in Persuasion.
Late 1805 – mid 1806: Final Bath residence on Trim Street (brief period).
While in Bath, the Austens socialised at the Pump Room and the Assembly Rooms and would have walked along the iconic Royal Crescent, Circus and Great Pulteney Street - locations referenced in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Royal Crescent and Circus
"The Crescent and the Circus were there to be admired - the Pump Room to be frequented; and the assembly rooms, and the play, and the public walks, and the agreeable people, were to be all sought after and enjoyed." (Chapter 20, Northanger Abbey)
No. 1 Royal Crescent is now a museum, and one of its interactive displays draws information from Jane Austen’s letters and fiction to help depict what life in Georgian Bath would have been like.
Assembly Rooms
"She [Catherine Morland] liked the idea of having an evening every week, where the world might be assembled, and the opportunity of looking at the fine ladies and gentlemen, of being stared at, and of listening to the fiddles, was every week to be enjoyed."(Chapter 19, Northanger Abbey)
Great Pulteney Street
"The streets, the squares, and the crescents of Bath were all full of people; and Anne, who was walking with the Miss Musgroves, was struck with the variety of appearance in the crowd."(Chapter 7, Persuasion)
Pump Room
"The Pump Room was crowded with company; the conversation was lively, and the elegance of the assembly added to the general pleasure."(Chapter 6, Persuasion)
Following her father's death, Jane, her mother, and sister moved to Southampton to live with her brother, Frank. In 1809, they moved to Chawton, where Jane found space and stability to write.
A blog on Jane Austen's life in Chawton to follow next month.
Comments