The baths themselves ensured that sociability flourished, and from them evolved the Assembly Rooms, where visitors gathered to drink the rather vile-tasting waters and to enjoy concerts. Dinners, dances, card parties, and chance encounters in the shopping streets brought drama to everyday life. It also brought a different sort of opportunity to the city, which became a place where marriages could be contracted and business could be done. Bath was, in short, an entrepreneurial dream.

It was a retreat for the wealthy, a spa, a place of sociability and fashion—all these things. But by 1800, when the Austens settled there, it was thirty or forty years out of date and more a destination for retired professionals like George Austen than for those in search of pleasure. Newer resorts and spas, like Brighton and Cheltenham, were attracting the young and adventurous.

Did Jane Austen’s parents, in choosing Bath, believe that the city might be an opportunity to exhibit, and perhaps find husbands for, their two daughters? It may have been one of many considerations; it may also be that they didn’t fully appreciate the fact that Bath was no longer as fashionable as it had once been. Or they might even have considered its old-fashioned flavor an advantage, a form of protection and unconscious consolation for Cassandra and Jane, whose futures as spinsters now seemed almost certain.

Bath became the main setting for two of Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey and, later, Persuasion, and in these two background glimpses of the city we can see the social forces moving from the dynamic in the earlier novel to the staid in Persuasion, where both compromise and reconciliation colored what Bath society had to offer. Each of the other novels, even the slight Lady Susan, touches tangentially on Bath. Wickham, in Pride and Prejudice, escapes to Bath in his later life, leaving marital dullness behind. And where else should Mr. Elton of Emma go to seek a wife, especially a foolish wife, but to Bath? Other characters are called to Bath on business, or they travel there for reasons of health or to take refuge in times of trouble. Bath, real or mythical, was part of Jane Austen’s geography, a place and also an idea. It had lost some of its excitement and edge in the late eighteenth century, but never its respectability or its healing powers. Jane Austen’s use of Bath demonstrates her precise understanding of new attitudes toward money and leisure. With the accurate placement of Bath in her contemporary universe she proves herself an astute reporter on sociological change.

12

TOWAR D THE END of the old century, the Austen family—the parents and two daughters—embarked on the matter of moving house. This took time and patience. It also took careful economic management. Fragile furniture was cheaper to replace than to move, so it was finally decided that only the family beds could be taken to the new home in Bath. A favorite sideboard was abandoned, and the Pembroke tables. Not surprisingly, old painted sets from the family theatricals in the barn were left behind, and with them the childhood memories of a full, vibrant family life. Jane Austen’s pianoforte was another of the losses of the move, the pianoforte on which she played every morning not for an audience, but for her own enjoyment. George Austen’s five-hundred-book library went up for sale, and realized a disappointing sum, though many of the volumes devolved to his son James. Books, music, mementos, familiar furniture, the beauty of a mature garden—all this was to be surrendered. Perhaps even worse was the parting with old friends like Martha Lloyd, Anne Lefroy, and the Bigg-Withers at Manydown Park.

Family feelings went sour during the relocation, at least between Jane Austen and her brother James, who, with his wife Mary, was to move into the rectory. Those items that were not sold or otherwise disposed of went directly to James’s family, and Jane’s letters of the time give the impression that she and Cassandra and her parents were being in-sensitively pushed from the family home, or at least politely hurried along and encouraged in their move to Bath.

Austen was obliged to leave the countryside she loved and become a city dweller. Even before departing from Steventon, she was, like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, “dreading the possible heats of September in all the white glare of Bath, and grieving to forego all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country . . .” The countryside, especially a landscape as familiar as Jane Austen’s corner of Hampshire, fostered contemplation, and was not only un-threatening but also heartening. She was rooted in its midst. We don’t often hear from her the trilling tones of the exuberant nature lover, but we can read in all the novels, and in all the major characters, an acceptance—and a preference—for country life.