Bath England
One fact that Bath’s otherwise informative Jane Austen Centre isn’t overkeen to stress is that the Georgian city’s most exalted resident wasn’t a huge fan of the place. She may have set two novels there, but Austen’s correspondence tells of her ‘happy feelings of escape’ on leaving Bath for Clifton.
What she was escaping was a town so dedicated to relentless pleasure in the form of gambling, parties, balls, romance and an attendant undertone of sleaze, it seems a precursor of Las Vegas. Two centuries on, Bath’s decadence gets
