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
Jane Austen earned her acclaim among critics, scholars, and popular audiences alike. With the publications of "Sense and Sensibility" (1811), "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Mansfield Park" (1814) and "Emma" (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion", both published posthumously in 1818, and began another, eventually titled "Sanditon", but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, a short epistolary novel "Lady Susan", and another unfinished novel, "The Watsons". Her six full-length novels have rarely been out of print, although they were published anonymously and brought