Ten wonderful days of celebrating all things Austen in the beautiful city of Bath

Friday 7th November 2025

November 2025, Jane Austen Festival Newsletter

To our dear fellow Austen-fans,

Make haste!

Those of you who joined us for our special 250th anniversary Pleasure Gardens event might remember watercolour artist Charlotte Atkinson working hard at her easel while the rest of us were having fun. The painting is now completed and hanging at the Jane Austen Centre in Gay Street, Bath, with  print copies for sale online!

2026 Jane Austen Festival Friend Membership

We at the Jane Austen Festival love a bit of correspondence, and we’ve been reading through the 2025 events feedback on how to run the Jane Austen Festival Friends next year with the utmost care and attention.

Jane Austen levels of diligence, amendments and re-workings abound here at festival HQ and you will notice that this year we have made some small but essential adjustments to our Festival Friend Membership. This is not to say our levels of friendship have been diluted; we still carry our notions of friendship very high!

The Jane Austen Festival team value the support of our Festival Friends immensely throughout the year, their annual Festival Friend Membership fee helps to support the continuation of the festival, enabling us to deliver all the balls, events and workshops we know all our attendees love. However, alongside making sure our Friends’ expectations can be met, we want to be able to welcome as many people in the wide-ranging Jane Austen fandom as possible to Bath.

Many of our most popular events, including balls, theatrical performances and smaller workshops, sell out incredibly quickly and giving our Festival Friends priority booking is a small way of thanking them for their support.

Festival Friend memberships will go on sale on 

Monday 1st December 2025

 at 14:00 GMT 

Memberships are limited in number, so move swiftly to secure yours. Head to our website to find full details on how our 2026 Festival Friend Memberships will operate

Things we have taken into account for managing 2026 ticket sales: 

• Our ever-loyal Festival Friends were such eager ticket-bookers in 2025, that many of our events did not even make it to general sales. For 2026 we will be ensuring a minimum of 25% tickets for each event will be held back for general ticket sales.
• We will be splitting our ticket sales into two ticket drops: Regency ball tickets will go on sale on one date, with all other Jane Austen Festival events going on sale a few weeks later.
  Both ticket drops will have a priority booking period of one week for Festival Friends.
• In 2026, our festival attendees will receive their QR codes for events 48 hours before each event. This will enable our ticket holders to receive their QR codes in the order in which they need to use them.

*ticket sale dates to be confirmed in the New Year.

2026 Summer Balls

The Jane Austen Festival is delighted to announce that the themes for our 2026 Regency Summer Balls will be:

The Gardens of Sotherton Summer Ball

Saturday 30th May 2026

“Here are the greatest number of our plants, and here are the curious pheasants.”

Inspired by the serpentine paths and wooded vistas of Sotherton in Mansfield Park, our May Summer Ball will be garden-themed. This will be reflected in our food and dances for the evening, and we invite you to add a touch of greenery, pheasant feathers or flowers to your Regency finery for the evening.

Fruit and Flowers of Bath Ball

Saturday 27th June 2026

Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra from Queen’s Square, Bath in June 1799 to describe Bath fashions, stating “Flowers are very much worn, and fruit is still more the thing”. Over two hundred years later, we still very much agree! Flowers and fruit will be the theme of this ball, reflected in the dances as well as the food served at this ball; we invite you to include a nod to this theme in your elegant Regency attire.

Inspired by Austen’s letter-writing, and the gentler pace of communication in Regency times, this ball will be a fully “switched-off” event. Once you have shown your ticket, you will be given a magnet-sealed mobile phone pouch in which your phone will be encased for the full duration of the evening*. You will be able to release your phone from the pouch on leaving the event.

*If you rely on any wearable medical technology that links to a mobile phone, we recommend that you attend our other summer ball. If you require further details, please contact the Jane Austen Festival team prior to tickets going on sale.

Both Summer Balls will be held in the Bath Guildhall; the dancing will be led by Liz Bartlett of the Jane Austen Dancers of Bath, with live music provided by Beau's Band. A mid-evening break will include a buffet supper. For both events Regency attire will be mandatory.

…dates of Summer Ball sale and prices to be announced soon!

Please note that our Summer Balls won't be included in Festival Friends priority booking, they will go straight to general sale. 

Applications are also currently open for our 2026 volunteer stewards. If you’ve attended the Festival before, have seen our team in action and thought “Oh that looks like jolly good fun!”, and can steward for the whole of the first weekend of next year's Jane Austen Festival, we would love to hear from you.

Finally, we are looking for some assistance from our dear newsletter subscribers! We have been perusing the photos from the 2025 Festival and would very much like to be able to contact the elegantly attired people in the following photos. If any of these people are your good self, or among your circle of acquaintance, we would love to be introduced!

With our best wishes for your health and happiness,

The Jane Austen Festival Team
Bath, UK