In Bath, Jane Austen fans are the prettiest people to go dancing
250 YEARS OF JANE AUSTEN (3/6). The English city is the beating heart of Austen tourism. Every year, it welcomes many visitors eager to walk, in period costume, in the footsteps of the writer who lived there. And if possible, to attend a ball. Several British journalists have tried the experience.
It's not uncommon to encounter women on the streets of Bath who look like they've stepped straight out of a Jane Austen novel. It's in this coastal city, where the writer lived from 1801 to 1806, that Austen tourism thrives, with lectures, balls, and costumed tours organized each year for fans.
British journalist Jemima Kelly took part in one of the five-day tours offered by the Strictly Jane Austen travel agency for the Financial Times , along with a majority of American tourists.
“There are sixteen of us, all women except one man who seems to have been dragged there by his wife, gathering in our English Regency [1811-1820] finery, trying to hear our guide while a musician, in the cobbled street behind us, plays the sensual piece I'll Be Missing You on the saxophone ,” she recounts in a humorous article.
Dressed in a scarlet cape and topped with a flamboyant wig from which feathers emerge, their guide first takes them to a famous building, the Grand Pump Room, which hosted balls and where Jane Austen set several scenes from Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Most of the visitors made their own outfits,
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