62. Jane Austen’s Bath

Bath is beautiful. Jane may have referred to it as ‘a bowl of soup’ (because it is in a valley, hills all around, and with a tendency to fog), but she was hauled off there against her will and hated it. ‘Another stupid party’, she wrote to Cassandra, ‘…I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreable’.

So we wandered around Bath, with Jane’s acerbity for company (‘Mrs Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright – I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’), and Edwina and I squeaking in excitement at every street corner.

Finding ourselves near Laura Place, we’d look at each other, quote, in unison, ‘Our cousins in Laura Place!’, and dash off – and the boys would exchange long-suffering looks and fall into line behind us. ‘Westgate Buildings! And who is Miss Anne Elliot to be visiting in Westgate Buildings?’

There are no milliners left on Milsom Street, though there is one just around the corner; we peeped into the Pump Room but didn’t taste the waters, and had two very nice coffees in the Assembly Rooms – where we could have, but didn’t, inscribe our names in the Visitors’ Book (no longer the Master of Ceremonies’ Book…).

Do you think that when Colin Firth signed up to play Mr Darcy, he realised that he was going to have his face framed in the ladies’ lavatory of the Jane Austen Centre, and his and Elizabeth Ehles’ faces identifying the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s respectively? And that if you order ‘High Tea with Mr Darcy’ (cucumber sandwiches, scones, cake, tea, served on tiered plates) in the Regency Tea Rooms, you eat your High Tea gazing at an even larger oil portrait (also gold-framed) of him?

And why would you want High Tea with Mr Darcy anyway? Surely he’d be a grump…

But the scones were superb (West Country clotted cream is wicked stuff), and there was a four-page menu of teas – no tea-bags here – so we were very happy, despite Mr Darcy’s smouldering looks.

The gift shop (fortunately not a giffte shoppe) at the Jane Austen Centre also does a nice line in ‘I love Mr Darcy’ carrier bags, teatowels, mugs, keyrings and bookmarks. Also a good selection of take-off Austen pseudo-literature. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Choose your own Jane Austen Adventure? Prawns and Prejudice (soon to be followed, surely, by Shrimps and Sensibility)? Mr Darcy, Vampyre? Mr Knightley’s Diary? Edmund Bertram’s Diary? (and, of course) Mr Darcy’s Diary? The title of this post is a book waiting to be written. I could make my fortune.

‘Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me…’, I quoted, secure in my scholarly snobbishness, with my complete, collected, edited, annotated Letters safe in my backpack.