Jane Austen

“A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.” —northanger abbey I awoke from the tunnel to the fields of yellow rape, seventeenth-century buildings, and cobbled streets as she would have seen them. It was rainy; the rain came and went, came and went so that you could not escape its dampness. I understood the need for tea and the luxury of cremes and pastries and why the ladies longed for a strong shoulder to see them through the winter. The seagulls cried overhead, though there was no sea, only a muddy river from Bath to Bristol. The scavengers lived on the rooftops and if desperate enough would swoop down and take a sandwich from your hand. I secured my room at the Royal Bath Hotel. It was a hovel, really, with a carpet as old as the early century. Walking through the hotel, I sensed something lurid in the air, every eye upon me as if they knew I was a foreigner in a strange land. Over the bed, a burgundy bedspread dusty and faded as vintage wine, made me long for the bright color of red. In the next room, sleepless, I heard through thin walls the sounds of an un-tender coupling. I looked in the warped mirror and found myself ugly and when I turned from it, could not escape the vision. It lingered. The rain came and went, came and went. I took an umbrella and began my walk, hoping to come upon her quarters. I passed the Roman Baths, the statues not beautiful, but puckered and fossilled and the Pump Room where her protagonist, other self, doppelgänger, good, strong, loyal Catherine, longing for companionship, fell under the seduction of Isabella and her reprehensible brother. Even then her coming out seemed less magisterial, and Bath a representation of the emptiness and evils of society where a woman’s dowry might confine her forever, than a reprieve from country life. I gave up my search. Images were everywhere. And my mind had been made up. I perceived no romance in the wind, no comfort in the hard glances of strangers, girls with chipped nail polish, lads unkempt as if there were no hope of glory. The next morning I boarded the train to the modern world and it wasn’t until a sheet of blue slipped out like a love letter from its envelope of dark gray sky that I knew the journey had ended and, like Catherine, I was finally safe.