PERSUASION, LYME AND THE COBB - GUEST POST BY HELENA FAIRFAX

The Cobb at Lyme Regis

My name’s Helena Fairfax. I’m a romance author and Jane Austen fan, and I’m thrilled to be here at My Jane Austen Book Club. I’m a British author, and I live in the north of England, in one of my favourite parts of the world – on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, the wild landscape which provided the setting for Emily Brontë’sWuthering Heights. 

My first two romance novels, The Silk Romance and The Antique Love, were published last year. (I’m proud to add here that The Silk Romance was described by one reviewer as ‘a mixture of Pride and Prejudice and Cinderella’. 

 As an Austen fan, her commentabsolutely thrilled me to bits.) This winter I spent some time on England’s south coast, in the county of Dorset. This part of the country was much loved by Jane Austen, especially the seaside town of Lyme Regis, which is the setting for Persuasion. If you follow me on Facebook you may already have seen some of my photos of Dorset on England's south coast, where I spent Christmas.

 On Christmas Day we visited Lyme Regis, a small town in Dorset, by the seaside. I was most excited about this, as I've never been to Lyme before, and anyone who's read Jane Austen's Persuasion will know it as the setting for her novel. It's also the setting for John Fowles The French Lieutenant's Woman, which features this famous scene between Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons on Lyme's Cobb. 

The Cobb is a man made wall that protects the harbour.  As quite often happens with these things, both the Cobb and the harbour were a lot smaller than I imagined.

COMPETITION - WIN JANE AUSTEN LITERARY WALKING TOURS IN LYME REGIS

© Literary Lyme Walking Tours 

Have we got the competition for you! For all you Jane Austen Persuasion fans, we have got the chance to visit Lyme Regis, where Persuasion is set and go on a Jane Austen tour of the town.

Jane Austen visited Lyme Regis in England on at least two separate occasions and set Persuasion, her last novel, in the town. On the Jane Austen tour we follow in the footsteps of Jane Austen and her characters around Lyme Regis. During the Jane Austen tour we take a walk along the Cobb to see the steps from which Louisa Musgrove fell on the famous harbour wall and visit the inns mentioned in Persuasion. We see the house in which she stayed and enjoy the pleasure of Lyme Regis's views, knowing that you are seeing the same sights as Jane Austen saw and loved.

VISITING BATH & LYME REGIS

Bath - The Crescent

Bath - One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it

On my tour of England from north to south last year (HERE) I couldn’t complete my Jane Austen pilgrimage, since my friends and I were following more than one trail (Richard III, movie locations, literature, abbeys and cathedrals) and each of us had put her own special goals on our common schedule. This is why we decided we would complete my Austen tour this year  visiting the South – West region of the Island and  starting from Somerset (we landed in Bristol),  more precisely  from Bath.

Me at the Roman Baths

The most common opinion on the years Jane Austen spent in Bath wants them unhappy and unproductive.

Jane arrived in Bath with Cassandra and her parents in 1800, after her father had unexpectedly announced his desire to retire from the ministry. Young Jane must have been really depressed if not shocked, though Bath was not and is not an unpleasant place .

Those (1800- 1809) are the years of The Watsons, which she left unfinished, of Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal (her only marriage proposal for what we know), which she rejected, but those are tragically and especially the years when her father died and left Jane, her mother and her sister doomed to live on the financial contributions of the Austen men.