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 "The Monk". Isabella Thorpe gives Catherine a list of seven books that are commonly referred to as the "Northanger 'horrid' novels"; these works were later thought to be of Austen's own invention until the British writers Montague Summers and Michael Sadleir re-discovered in the 1920s that they actually did exist. The list is as follows: All seven of these were republished by the Folio Society in London in the 1960s, and since 2005 Valancourt Books has released new editions of the 'horrids', the seventh and final being released in 2015. The most significant allusion, however, is to Ann Radcliffe's "The