Ten wonderful days of celebrating all things Austen in the beautiful city of Bath
|
|
|
|
Jane Austen Festival Newsletter
|
|
|
|
To our dear fellow Austen-fans, far and near,
A large debt of gratitude is owing here…
Our heartfelt thanks to all of you who took part in the 2025 Jane Austen Festival!
|
|
|
|
Whether you followed in Austen’s footsteps and made the journey to Bath, joined us online or admired from afar via our social media, we are so very grateful to you all for accompanying us as we celebrated 250 years since Jane Austen’s birth.
If you’ve been eagerly awaiting a glimpse of your portrait from a Jane Austen Festival event will be delighted to hear that our official photographer, Sean Strange, has been hard at work and the photos are now available to view here.
|
|
|
|
|
The Jane Austen Festival has been featured in various forms of the press this year, probably about as many times during 2025 as Jane Austen herself uses the word love in her novels... So whether you love or loath five minutes of fame, here are a few moving portrait snippets you may be able to spot yourself in.
|
|
|
|
The Jane Austen Festival was ably assisted this year by our most agreeable partners: Audible, who sponsored the whole Jane Austen Festival, and PostScript Independent Booksellers, who sponsored the 2025 Grand Regency Promenade.
|
|
|
|
Not a single dance step, stitch or ticket scan during the Festival would be possible without our hard working team of volunteer stewards. They battled through some decidedly gothic weather this year (thunder and lightning worthy of Northanger Abbey, and rain that would give an Austen-heroine a dangerous fever!) to keep the events running smoothly. We are so
very grateful for the cheerfulness, good humour and resilience they showed throughout the hundreds of events they welcomed people to.
|
|
|
|
Feedback & Four-Legged Friends
Many of you took the time and care to fill in our feedback form following this year’s Festival. We are told by our data analyst that we had far more responses than normal email surveys would expect to receive- we always knew that we could count on Jane Austen fans to be prompt and fulsome in their correspondence, however it was very nice to hear confirmed by a professional what we always knew- Jane
Austen fans are a helpful community who care about helping to improve things!
We absolutely loved some of the ideas you came up with for next year (...more on which at a future date!), and value your honesty in telling us what you wished had been different this year.
To address some of these points now, the biggest single bit of feedback we had was that people wanted more ball tickets. Indeed, we would have loved to welcome more people to a dance floor in Bath! However the Jane Austen Festival cares not just about fitting people into events, but also about making sure those people are safe, comfortable and happy. The number of
people we have found we can comfortably fit into a ball (with space for dancing, socialising and without anyone’s muslin getting crushed!) is up to 130 at the Guildhall, and between 100 - 160 depending on which rooms are used at the Pump Rooms.
We very much wish we had the drawing room described by Austen in Jack and Alice from her juvenalia: “its size not amounting to more than 3 quarters of a mile in length & half a one in breadth”. Alas, such a venue doesn’t exist in Bath! So, until our dear friends at the National Trust Assembly Rooms in Bath are able to get back into their newly refitted building (support them here!) we are sadly limited on the amount of space we can welcome dancers into all at once.
|
To the intrepid individual who named “Tall ship voyage” as their future dream Regency event: we greatly admire your adventurous spirit and regret deeply that this will be impractical to organise from landlocked Bath. If you ever find a way to make this dream a reality, do let us know as a certain Festival Director would love to be the
first aboard!
|
To the person who stated “The team did their best to include pretty much every feasible suggestion I made last year”... thanks for noticing! We really do read and value all the feedback that people take the time and effort to give us, positive or negative.
|
|
|
|
You know we carry our notions of friendship pretty high…
|
We know that many of you are eagerly awaiting news of how the 2026 Festival Friends system will work. Alas, we have no news to give you today! We want to fully review all the feedback suggestions on how best to run this, as well as how people found it this year, before we make a decision on how it will work for 2026. We do
appreciate that many of you are having to display Anne Elliot-like levels of patience while we take the time to do this thoroughly, and are grateful for your forbearance.
|
|
|
|
The dates for the 2026 Jane Austen Festival are:
11th-20th September 2026
|
We will also again be holding two Summer Balls
|
|
|
|
More details will be released soon - including themes and ticket sale dates
|
With our best wishes for your health and happiness,
The Jane Austen Festival Team
Bath, UK
|
|
|
|
© JaneAusten.co.uk
40 Gay Street, Bath, United Kingdom, BA1 2NT
This email was sent to [[contact.email]] because you've subscribed on our site or made a purchase.
Edit preferences | Unsubscribe
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
