Grand Pump Room, Bath one of its guest conductors during the early 20th century. The novelist Jane Austen was familiar with the Pump Room, which is used as a setting in her novels "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion". It was a meeting place for fashionable people, where "Every creature in Bath [...] was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours". It is here that Catherine Morland, the heroine of "Northanger Abbey" first meets Henry Tilney, another principal character in the novel. In "Persuasion", Admiral Croft retires to Bath to take the waters, because of his gout. The Pump Room
Northanger Abbey way that Henry disapproves of, she is warned: "The word 'nicest', as you use it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or you shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way". The popular 18th century arbiters of style and taste such as Johnson, Richardson, Blair and Addison are presented as a cannon of masculine power, which the novel is competition with at least as much as the Gothic novels, that were so popular with young women at the time. Irvine wrote that the way in which