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 match between Catherine and Henry is implied as both smart and fitting. Tenille Nowak has noted that critics and editors of "Northanger Abbey" often suggest that the names Laurentina and St Aubin appearing in the text are misrememberings of character names from "Udolpho"; Nowak observes that due to there being very few copies of "The Orphan of the Rhine" available these critics did not realise that the names actually appear in their exact form Sleath's novel. Nowak observes other instances where Sleath's novel is echoed by Austen, particularly in her descriptions of place. A passage from the novel appears