REGENCY ROMANCE: Jane Austen’s Funny Valentine and the greatest love letter of all time
As Valentine’s Day approaches, our guest blogger, Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm, considers Valentine’s celebrations in Bath and how Jane Austen composed the finest protestation of love in all literature but never realised her own romantic dreams.
Minerva is the patroness of these springs. In her shrine, the perpetual fires never whiten into ashes, Roman geographer Solinus, 3rd Century AD
Bath is a romantic city. It is also a Roman city, and a city that figured strongly in the Romantic movement. So, across the centuries, it has remained a place of imagination, love, and intrigue.
The Roman Baths are at the heart of the city that once housed the temples and shrines to Sulis Minerva, the Romano-Celtic goddess of healing and sacred waters. The settlement and temple complex of Aquae Sulis, where the modern city stands, were built for recreation and devotion to the goddess and became the most popular spa resort outside of the Italian peninsula.
The Romans’ festivals travelled with them as they made their conquests. These holidays took on characteristics from the peoples and regions they conquered. One key calendar highlight was the feast of Lupercalia. This was a pastoral celebration of – what shall we say? The birds and the bees! In The Roman month of Februarius, the shortest of the year, the feast of the Roman Wolf – the Lupus – marked the founding of their culture. Romulus and Remus, suckled by the she-wolf, were the focus of honour, along with the celebration of the first stirrings of fertility in the ground. At this point in the year birds chose their mates, and thus was felt the anticipation of eggs at the feast of the Celtic goddess Eostre at the spring equinox, the forerunner of Easter.
The Feast of St Valentine has its origins in the story of the Roman martyr and naturally slotted into the calendar on the 14th February. Valentine, a priest, is said to have performed marriage ceremonies for early Christians, when such were banned by the Roman Emperor. He had his heart removed for his trouble. In a final letter, to a woman he had cured of blindness, he wrote from prison signing his name, ‘Your Valentine’. This marked the birth of a holiday and an industry devoted to romance.
The city of Bath owes its development and layout to the neo-classicism of the 18th Century. When scholars, philosophers and artists rediscovered the legacy of antique cultures, Bath was a natural location for people to come together, in the footsteps of the Romans in Britain.
A focus for culture, belief, entertainment – and romance – when Jane Austen moved to Bath in 1801 it was ostensibly to re-settle with her family when her father retired from his Steventon parish. The lure of Bath, however, was significant as a place where there might be the possibility of proposals for the unmarried sisters, Jane and Cassandra. Would they make a match? Well, where Jane was concerned – almost.
They were known to be on the marriage market, however reluctantly, and so accepted an invitation from their long-term friends Alethea and Catherine Bigg to stay at the Manydown estate in Hampshire. It was there, in December 1802, that Jane accepted a proposal of marriage from Alethea’s younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither.
Harris Bigg-Wither
Young Harris, at 21, was five years her junior and heir to the estate. What a different picture we would have of Austen’s life if she had gone ahead with it. Having slept on her decision, however, she changed her mind the next day and called on her brother, James, at Steventon to take her back to Bath. Was it because she did not want the responsibility of maintaining a large country estate as its mistress and preferred instead the writing life? As Jane Bigg-Wither she might not have managed to fulfil her ambitions in that area.
There are many that feel sadness in the knowledge that Jane Austen did not enjoy the harmony and happiness she bestowed on her characters. However, she left us with a wonderful legacy and like Catherine in Northanger Abbey or Anne in Persuasion, Bath might just be the city where you find your heart’s desire and true love blossoms.
Let us conclude, then, with the most memorable lines of perhaps the greatest love letter ever written, Captain Wentworth to Anne in Persuasion:
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.
