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 begun during that period, probably about 1794. However, the references to several Gothic novels published after 1794 would indicate Austen did not finish the book until about 1798 or 1799 as Cassandra Austen remembered. The scholar Cecil Emden argued that differences between the Catherine portrayed in the Bath section of the novel vs. the Catherine at Northanger Abbey were due to Austen finishing the book at a different stage of her life than when she started. As in all of Austen's novels, the subjects of society, status, behavior, and morality are addressed. "Northanger Abbey," however, being chronologically the first novel