We are in England for two weeks because we received a grant from the Laycock Center for
Creative Collaboration to make an illustrated travel guide of Jane Austen's England.
I am the advertiser, she's the illustrator and she's the writer.
"Jane Was Here: an illustrated guide to Jane Austen's England" started off as a project at BYU.
Lexi Nilson and I were good friends and so we met
Nicole as the writer and so we got together and we decided to create a travel guide.
So we went to England and now we are here with a book in hand trying to tell the world about it.
I would say that Bath tops the list of sights to see in England.
Bath is a lovely Roman spa town in Somerset southwest England
and it is most well known for the Roman bath. And at Jane Austen's time the city was a spa
resort and many of the fashionable people of her day gathered there.
Her father lived in Bath in the early 1800s and Jane lived there with her family.
She didn't love the city itself, but it clearly had an impact on her and she wrote about it in
many of her novels. Bath has so much to see; there's the Jane Austen Center which really
gives you an insight into her life there and also fun artifacts and interactive exhibits.
It's a place where she wrote about in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Bath plays a key role and you can visit the same places that some of the characters go, whether
that be the assembly rooms or the pump room or the Roman baths themselves, the royal crescent, and
there's just so much to see in such a small area so it is the perfect stop on a Jane Austen trip.
It's so hard to choose a favorite but Stourhead Gardens I think is one of my all-time favorite
places that we visited because I love gardens, but I especially love English gardens.
Stourhead is an estate located in southern England. It's not too far from Bath so we
visited it while we were staying in Bath. It was built just about 20 years before Jane Austen's
birth so though she has no direct connection to the estate, styling reflects Austin's time
period which makes it a great place to film a regency romance adaptation. It includes a big
house as well as a garden, and while the house is magnificent, what really captured my heart is
the garden and that's where Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth for the first time during a very
moody rainstorm. So you kind of have this feeling that there's like adventure around every corner,
but like not the kind of adventure that's gonna scar you forever but it's gonna leave you changed
but stronger in the end, and so I just remember feeling like I was walking through a storybook.
It is so worth the trip to go to Lyme Park. When I walked down and saw the grandeur of that estate,
like I actually gasped about how beautiful it was. They had a garden called the Dutch Gardens and
the pond that Darcy dove into in the mini series and that was
honestly going there I thought, "I would live here, I would marry someone who owns this"
and so in the part of the novel where it talks about Elizabeth realizing that that's what she
let go, I felt that moment because I was like "I can't believe you let that go either."
I would recommend anyone if they want to follow our footsteps and I would read her novels
and I would definitely watch her adaptations because the experience will be that much greater.