Jane Austen, reportedly Britain’s favourite author, will be on the £10 bank note sometime in 2017. This was stated by Mr Carney, when discussing women on banknotes for the BBC, saying, “Jane Austen certainly merits a place…on our banknotes. Her novels … (have a) universal appeal.” According to BBC News, Austen will be the 17th historical figure to appear on a banknote.

But what inspired Jane Austen, to write such brilliant novels, including ridiculous personages?

On Thursday 16th February, I was lucky enough to visit the splendid city of Bath. Sources say that during the period that Austen was at Bath, she suffered a lengthened “writers’ block”, but Jane Austen was still greatly inspired by the fashionable city. She largely set her first novel (Northanger Abbey) and last novel (Persuasion) in Bath. “Who can be tired of Bath?” is a quote from Northanger Abbey, and is written on a placard stuck to one of the many doors in the “Jane Austen Centre”.

Jane Austen first visited Bath with her sister Cassandra, when she was 22. She stayed for a length of time at the house of her mother’s brother and his wife, Paragon, where she was constantly reminded of her inferiority (her father was a clergyman; her mother was from an aristocratic family) by her aunt by marriage. This aunt was perhaps an inspiration for the numerous pompous females which Jane Austen is famous for writing about, including Lady Catherine du Burgh and Lady Middleton.

In Bath, Jane Austen went to small parties and large parties as a matter of course. Austen hated the “stupid” small parties; she felt that everyone was forced to make conversation with one another. This hatred of stultifying parties is perhaps reflected in Sense and Sensibility, wherein the protagonists Elinor and Marianne have to make light conversation with Mrs Ferrars and Lady Middleton at Mrs Ferrars’s ball.

Austen was reported to have been a great dancer; she was full of what she named: “animal spirits”. According to Deborah Lutz, in an introduction to Pride and Prejudice, she used to ramble round the countryside with her fellow “desperate walker”, Martha Lloyd, through the “nice black frost”. Walking was a form of escapism of the rigid structure of a lady’s chores. Deborah Lutz remarks, in the introduction, that Elizabeth Bennet is a “surrogate for Austen’s own thinking about existence”.

Jane Austen has been a worldwide inspiration; her novel Pride and Prejudice, which was much too clever to be work of a woman (said by a man to Jane Austen’s favourite brother Henry), was published in 1813, and was a bestseller since then. According to Claire Tomalin, writer of Jane Austen: A Life, well-known admirers of Jane Austen’s work included Lady Bessborough and little Princess Charlotte, who, as claimed by Ms. Tomalin, identified with Marianne of Sense and Sensibility.

Amrita Bhattacharyya