A New Jane Austen Play Will Be Showing This September!

This year as part of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, audiences will be treated to a new and exciting Jane Austen themed play. It will join the festival this September after being nominated for the 29th Writers Guild of Great Britain Best Play Award, and having sell out shows at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. 

As many will be aware, Jane Austen made Bath her home between 1801 and 1806. However, you may not know that Jane also made a trip to the nearby rival spa town of Cheltenham roughly six months after finishing Emma. The inspiration for this new play, titled Jane Austen and The Cheltonians, uses Jane Austen's Cheltenham trip to imagine what a sequel to Emma might have looked like. 

The play opens with Jane recounting her time in Bath whilst taking a restorative trip to Cheltenham and beginning her next novel, 'The Cheltonians'. We encounter Emma as a newly married woman, up to her old match making tricks but with a new confidante named Eloisa Fairweather. Eloisa is modelled on the real life wife of Colonel Despard, and the play depicts Jane reflecting on the changing social moods of early nineteenth century England.

You can purchase tickets for this years highly anticipated Jane Austen Festival on our website. The play is part of a range of activities and will take place at the Mission Theatre on Corn Street in Bath, on the 15th of September at 7:30pm. 

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