COMPOSITION

Unlike some of Jane Austen's other works, where the geographical settings are only vaguely indicated, the greater part of this novel is very specifically located in Bath, the elegant inland spa patronised for holidays by the wealthy and leisured since the seventeenth century; out of thirty-one chapters, four are set at the heroine's home in fictitious Fullerton, nine at the eponymous and equally fictitious Northanger Abbey and eighteen in the genuine city of Bath. This emphasis is not surprising, since Bath was a constant backdrop to the life of the Austen family. Jane's mother, Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827), lived there for some years in her youth, and married the Revd George Austen (1731–1805) at Walcot church in 1764; Cassandra's elder sister, Jane Leigh, and her husband, Revd Dr Edward Cooper, lived in Royal Crescent and Bennett Street from 1771 to 1783; and Mrs Austen's brother, James Leigh- Perrot (1735–1812), and his wife, Jane Cholmeley (1744–1836) – a wealthy and childless couple, who are always referred to in Jane Austen's letters as ‘my uncle’ and ‘my aunt’ – soon developed the habit of spending half the year on their estate in Berkshire and the other half in Bath, at No. 1 Paragon Buildings.

It is not known when Austen herself first became personally acquainted with Bath, but it was probably in the spring/summer of 1794, when she and her elder sister, Cassandra, visited Leigh cousins in Gloucestershire; in travelling to and from Hampshire it would be very surprising if they did not pass through both Bath and Gloucester en route. It must have been this Gloucestershire trip which gave Austen the local knowledge that she used afterwards for her novel, and no doubt she too stopped off at Petty France to change horses when taking the main road northwards out of Bath. As we subsequently learn that Catherine Morland's return to Fullerton involved a journey of seventy miles (vol. 2, ch. 13), this means that Austen must have envisaged Northanger Abbey as being somewhere in the Vale of Berkeley, lying on the flood-plain of the river Severn and tucked under the steep western edge of the Cotswold limestone escarpment.