Jane Austen Centre.

"Miss Austen writes to her sister on May 15 (1801), "I hope you honoured my toilette and ball with a thought (last evening). I dressed as well as I could, and had all my finery much admired at home. By nine o'clock my uncle, aunt and I entered the rooms. Before tea it was rather a dull affair, but then the before tea did not last long, for there was only one dance, danced by four couples. Think of four couples surrounded by about a hundred people dancing in the Upper Rooms at Bath. After tea we cheered tip ; the breaking up of private parties sent some scores more to the ball, and though it was shockingly and inhumanly thin for this place, there were people enough, I suppose, to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies." In May the Bath season was just drawing to a close, so Jane's experience was very different to that of her heroine Catherine Morland at her first ball in these same rooms during the height of the season. We remember how she and Mrs. Allen slowly squeezed their way through the throng, and how, during the whole evening, poor Catherine could see "nothing of the dancers, but the high feathers of some of the ladies." Extract from "Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends" (Open Library)

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