English Rose: The Jane Austen Centre in Bath

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The Jane Austen Centre in Bath

Jane Austen Centre

The Jane Austen Centre in Bath is a quaint and beautiful museum that preserves the memory of Bath's "most famous resident."

Outside the center you are greeted by Jane Austen herself... Well a mannequin of "Austen", but either way, the Austen look alike provides a great photo opp.

Upon entering the Jane Austen Centre you are greeted by Mr. Darcy (a.k.a. Colin Firth), which is very fitting and most definitely sets one in an Austen mood. After ascending the staircase, lined with portraits of Austen's most famous characters, the upstairs room is filled with Austen memorabilia. The portrait of Jane Austen painted by her sister Cassandra is quaintly displayed along with regency costumes and other Austen artifacts. When upstairs, a tour guide gives an overview of Austen's life and the impact that Bath had on her.

Austen and her family moved to Bath in 1801 and lived there until 1806. Almost all of her novels mention Bath, but Austen's most famous "Bath novels" are Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

The Jane Austen Centre also displays various exhibits throughout the year. While on my visit the exhibition being displayed were the costumes from ITV's Miss Austen Regrets. Along with the costumes were first editions of Austen's novels including a letter that Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra.

After the exhibit and the gift shop, a stop at the Tea Room, also located upstairs, was a necessity. Who could resist having tea with Mr. Darcy?

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Persuasion

Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that such a match is unworthy. The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When later Wentworth returns from sea a rich and successful captain, he finds Anne's family on the brink of financial ruin and his own sister a tenant in Kellynch Hall, the Elliot estate. Al the tension of the novel revolves around one question: Will Anne and Wentworth be reunited in their love?

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility

Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love—and its threatened loss—the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.

Mansfield Park

Begun in 1811 at the height of Jane Austen's writing powers and published in 1814, Mansfield Park marks a conscious break from the tone of her first three novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, the last of which Austen came to see as "rather too light." Fanny Price is unlike any of Austen's previous heroines, a girl from a poor family brought up in a splendid country house and possessed of a vast reserve of moral fortitude and imperturbability. She is very different from Elizabeth Bennet, but is the product of the same inspired imagination.

Emma

"I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,' wrote Jane Austen in planning Emma (1816). Yet few readers have failed to enjoy the ironies of Emma's high-handed vanity, or to warm to her liveliness and wit. While she devotes her formidable energies to matchmaking between friends and acquaintances in the village of Highbury, the plot turns on a romance of which she is wholly unaware. Her own falling in love delights readers who have been anticipating it as profoundly as it perplexes Emma, who has not. 'Of all great writers, she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness,' wrote Virginia Woolf of Jane Austen. This is never more true than in Emma, as Fiona Stafford discusses in her introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition.

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and and optimistic of Jane Austen's works.

Jane Eyre

A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman's quest for freedom. This updated edition features a new introduction discussing the novel's political and magical dimensions. Having grown up an orphan in the home of her cruel aunt and at a harsh charity school, Jane Eyre becomes an indepent and spirited survivor—qualities that serve her well as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him whatever the consequences or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving her beloved?

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

"I no longer love my husband – I HATE him! The word stares at me in the face like a guilty confession" Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behaviour becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced. It is only when she allows Gilbert to read her diary that the truth is revealed and the shocking details of the disastrous marriage she has left behind emerge. Told with great immediacy, combined with wit and irony, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful depiction of a woman’s struggle for domestic independence and creative freedom.