Jane Austen in Bath: Walking Tours of the Writer’s City is a beautifully illustrated book organized into four walking tours around the city of Bath–where she set both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion–two novels that mirrored her own experience: that of an impressionable, optimistic young girl hoping to meet the man she would marry and later, that of a mature woman disappointed in love. It was in Bath that many of Austen’s own romantic adventures and misadventures occurred, and this book artfully weaves together the story of Austen’s life there with those of her beloved characters. This guidebook describes the places frequented by Austen and her characters. Readers can stroll along the shady, tree-lined walk where Anne Elliot met Captain Wentworth after he returned from seven years at sea, and visit the galleries that hosted the glittering balls where the impressionable young Catherine Moreland made her debut. Bath is an exquisite, perfectly preserved Georgian town located in the stunning countryside just an hour and a half from London. It was a spa town in Austen’s day and still is. The streets, crescents, gardens, and buildings look almost exactly the same as they did then. Many of the places that she frequented are still there–visitors can still buy the traditional Sally Lunn rolls at the same bakery/caf? that Austen frequented; enter the famous Pump Rooms and Assembly Rooms where she drank the waters, gossiped, and danced; stroll the unique Georgian crescents and pleasure gardens where she enjoyed fireworks and lavish public breakfasts; and see the homes Austen and her family lived in, some of which are now open to the public. Jane Austen in Bath is the perfect companion to discovering the vibrant and fashionable social scene of Bath during both Austen’s time and today.

'Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire' J. K. Rowling Catherine Morland is a young girl with a very active imagination. Her naivety and love of sensational novels lead her to approach the fashionable social scene in Bath and her stay at nearby Northanger Abbey with preconceptions that have embarrassing and entertaining consequences.

A LOVE STORY LOST IN PRIDE & PREJUDICE... It is high summer when Ellie Bentley joins an archaeological dig at Jane Austen's childhood home. She's always had a talent for 'seeing' into the past and is not easily disturbed by her encounters with Mr Darcy's ghost at the house where she's staying. When Ellie travels into the past she discovers exactly what happened whilst Jane danced her way through the snowy winter of 1796. As Steventon Rectory and all its characters come to life, Ellie discovers the true love story lost in Pride and Prejudice - a tale which has its own consequences for her future destiny, changing her life beyond imagination.

John Matthews' "Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme" (1795) is a humorous picture of a typical day in the most fashionable resort town of late Georgian England. For the gouty and the infirm, Bath offered health: its mineral waters, whether bathed in or drunk, were thought to relieve a variety of complaints. For everyone else, there was endless entertainment, from the morning visit to the Pump Room to the famous public balls held four evenings a week. Bath was also the city that Jane Austen knew best, lived in longest, and wrote most about. Every one of her novels at least mentions Bath, and large portions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are set there. Published in 1795, Matthews' poem captures the town just two years before Austen visited it for the first time. The sights and sounds he describes are the very ones that would have greeted a twenty-one-year-old Austen or a seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland.This edition offers an array of critical resources that use "Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme" to deepen readers' appreciation of Austen's life and work. The Biographical Essay explores parallels between the lives of John Matthews and Jane Austen. The Contextual Essay introduces readers to the tradition of the "Bath satire," a popular genre in the late eighteenth century that Austen refined and expanded in her two Bath novels. The notes on the text provide not only historical and cultural information, but images of late Georgian Bath and direct connections between the poem and Austen's novels.

At her death in 1817, Jane Austen left the world six of the most beloved novels written in English—but her shortsighted family destroyed the bulk of her letters; and if she kept any diaries, they did not survive her. Now acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin, author of A Life of My Own, has filled the gaps in the record, creating a remarkably fresh and convincing portrait of the woman and the writer. While most Austen biographers have accepted the assertion of Jane's brother Henry that "My dear Sister's life was not a life of events," Tomalin shows that, on the contrary, Austen's brief life was fraught with upheaval. Tomalin provides detailed and absorbing accounts of Austen's ill-fated love for a young Irishman, her frequent travels and extended visits to London, her close friendship with a worldly cousin whose French husband met his death on the guillotine, her brothers' naval service in the Napoleonic wars and in the colonies, and thus shatters the myth of Jane Austen as a sheltered and homebound spinster whose knowledge of the world was limited to the view from a Hampshire village.

A trip back to the world of Jane Austen and the homes she lived in with noted historian Lucy Worsley.