Location And Literary Creation: Bath In The World Of Jane Austen

This paper takes a close look at the way Jane Austen's sojourning in Bath, a British middle class town at the end of eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, had impacted on her writing, and goes on to explore the crucial yet often neglected relationship between location and literary creation.The paper first reconstructs Bath's unique socio-cultural ethos at the turn of the nineteenth century and contrasts it with that of the Hampshire countryside where Jane Austen grew up and spent most of her life. This is followed by a close reading and comparison between the novels Jane Austen wrote before leaving Hampshire for Bath and those after she came back to her native country following a 5-year stay in that bourgeois town. A clear parallel between the change in Jane Austen's location and the change in the perspective, attitude, and sensibilities embodied in her works indicates that Jane Austen's Bath experiences had enabled her to develop a more sophisticated view on the rising middle class, and to sober up to a certain extent about the severe restrictions that the prevailing bourgeois values and interests of her days had imposed on love and marriage.Using Bath's influences on Jane Austen's literary conception as an exemplar, the paper comes to the final conclusion that far from merely providing an author with the "raw materials" for a story, the idiosyncratic "language" of place has a major impact on whatever one might choose to mean in her art. An author's literary production is inseparable with the locations where she has been.