Walking Tour: Reading Bath Between The Lines
22 May @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm
Meet at the Bath World Heritage Centre
It’s hard to think of another English provincial city with more literary associations than Bath. Geoffrey Chaucer chose a Bath citizen to recount one of his Canterbury Tales. Henry Fielding was a regular visitor to 18th-century Bath and transformed the English novel. Regency Bath was brought to life not only by Jane Austen but by her later admirer, Georgette Heyer. Charles Dickens set part of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in 19th-century Bath, delighting in the comic characters to be found here.
This walk, led by qualified Blue Badge tour guides, also considers other writers who connections should be better known and who deserve to be more widely read. Isabel Colegate portrayed a very different Bath of faded splendour after the fashionable had gone. Feminist writer Angela Carter championed recognition of Mary Shelley’s stay in Bath in 1816, during which time Shelley wrote a substantial portion of her ground-breaking novel Frankenstein. Now a successful generation of new writers are emerging from Bath Spa University.
We encounter all these novelists and more, stopping at places that inspired them, from the grandeur of Great Pulteney Street to quiet corners, to discover Bath’s enduring appeal to writers.
The Bath Festival
Celebrating music and literature, the Bath Festival fills the city with melodies and excitement.
