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
Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels titular "Northanger Abbey", or Donwell Abbey in "Emma"), parks (mansions surrounded by a vast park, like Mansfield Park in the novel of the same name, or Rosings Park in "Pride and Prejudice"), courts (another type of mansion, in theory approached via a vast courtyard, like Sotherton Court in "Mansfield Park"), halls (manors, like Uppercross Hall in "Persuasion", and finally simple houses, like Longbourn House, the home of the Bennet family in "Pride and Prejudice". This is why Catherine Morland is so delighted when she discovers Northanger Abbey, thinking, "With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court,