Thursday 25th December 2025

December 2025, Jane Austen Festival Newsletter

Merry Christmas from the Jane Austen Festival Team to all our newsletter subscribers!

We wanted to share with you- our most faithful correspondents- the first images of our 2025 Yuletide ball. Much merriment was had by all! Our grateful thanks to photographer Elizabeth Wattsfor her swift hard work in getting us these images.

Much merriment was had with dancing, music, dinner and  birthday toasts, with the evening drawing to a close with this magnificent (around 2ft tall) birthday cake celebrating our most esteemed author.

This event marks the culmination of our year of celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. It has been a wonderful year, and however you have been part of it (whether you joined us for an event, watched online, admired from afar on our social media or sent us messages of support) we are so very grateful for your support.

Read on for a heart-warming tale from the saga of 2025…

One of our proudest achievements in 2025 was the free Jane Austen Character Trail around Bath. It has long been an ambition of ours to provide a free, large-scale activity like this and it wouldn’t have been achievable without the generous support of our delightful partners Bath BID and Nicholas Wylde Jewellers.

2025 was naturally a hectic year for the Jane Austen Festival team, so we found time to actually write the trail on a midnight train, returning from a press night in London! It was an absolute joy for us (...and certainly intriguing for our earwigging fellow passengers) to search through Austen’s novels, choosing which iconic quotes and characters our participants would most enjoy figuring out. A few short weeks later (the first pictures went up on the day of our Summer Ball!), the trail of quotes from Austen’s novels alongside artwork of her characters appeared in locations all over beautiful Bath for participants to track down! We are delighted to have helped connect people with Austen’s novels in the 250th anniversary of her birth. Thanks to sponsorship from Wylde Jewellers and Bath BID, who provided a way that people could join in with the Festival, and the wider 2025 celebrations, for free.

Festival Director Georgia Delve, alongside Miriam Zaccarelli and Alison Stubbs of Bath BID sat down and checked through each entry booklet and online submission. This took the pile of submissions from 80 entries down to 40 correct ones… it seems that a goodly number of Austen experts were stumbled over Marianne’s ankle and named Sir John Middleton instead as the speaker of her quote!

The 40 correct trail entries were placed into a bonnet and the winner was picked at random by Festival Director Georgia. The lucky winner, Millie, was in Bath when she spotted a cute picture from the trail and got hooked in… just as we planned! Millie had only read Pride & Prejudice and Emma, so found all of those characters first… then, she read the remaining four novels to complete the trail! Millie has fond memories of sitting in the Garrick’s Head pub (one of the participating venues) reading an Austen novel and making detailed notes on her trail booklet, as she eliminated characters. In fact, she had to make a second trip to the Jane Austen Centre to pick up a second booklet to fill in neatly. It was a joy to behold, with colour coding for characters and novels.

We’re delighted that fate decreed the name picked at random out of a bonnet turned out to be someone who put in so much effort. Millie won a sterling silver Wylde Jewellers Jane Austen pendant, commissioned specially for the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. Millie’s pendant was especially engraved with her choice of words about her favourite Austen novel “Pride & no Prejudice”.

Pendants are still available to buy here, if you’d like to have one (or buy one for an Austen fan) to remember the fun and festivities of the 250th anniversary year!

With all good wishes, and hoping to see you across a ball room, lecture hall or dueling ground in the New Year,

The Jane Austen Festival Team
Bath, UK