*Tea for Two

Bath is a mixture of Roman, medieval, neoclassical, and modern architecture and art. But the overwhelming period is the elegance of the neoclassical Georgian. Grecian columns and Roman arches line the stone paved roads. Egyptian obelisks stand in the middle of grassy patches. The Georgian period included not only the reign of the four King Georges originally from Hanover, Germany, but such figures as George Friedrich Handel, Thomas Gainsborough, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen.

To gain a better understanding of Austen's novels, all you have to do is visit Bath. Not only do two of her novels take place in Bath, but all tie into the lifestyle that still echoes in the city streets. Except for the modern storefronts at ground level, many of the streets remain unchanged from the days that Austen lived there. Number 1 at the Royal Crescent not only remains unchanged on the outside, but has been restored to period on the inside as well. You can walk in and see the drawing room where women of Austen's time entertained. A piano forte and tea service stand in the room, two important entertainments of the time: music to pass the time, and tea to gossip over. Bath has other surviving forms of entertainment as well. The Upper Assembly Rooms have been restored. Though the large rooms are relatively empty, you can still feel how it would be packed with people dancing and flirting. Down the street from the Assembly Rooms is the Pump Room, the daytime public entertainment. Again the rooms turn book paragraph to a true sense of what it was like. Walking through the tall, simply elegant rooms reveals how it would have been to meet friends there and walk about hoping to meet someone worth talking to.

I didn't learn any new fact or trivia about Austen, but I finally learned what her life was like. Actually standing in the rooms, rather than watching a movie, brought the black and white pages of her novels to living colour. The echoes in the rooms from walking across the wood floors, the chime of a clock in the drawing room, the wind blowing through the narrow stone streets added a dimension to her writing that reaffirmed how exquisite her novels are. She described these things so very close to how they really feel. There aren't any other words that could describe Bath so completely as her own. She captures the feel as well as the look of the place, in addition to the characters within it. After comparing the books to the place, it is no mystery that her novels have become part of great literature.