Inside the Regency ballroom: what you’d experience on a night out with Jane Austen

By Hillary Burlock, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, University of Liverpool

The ballrooms of Jane Austen’s Britain have been hailed in literature and period dramas as a marriage market where young men and women could meet and mingle. The ballroom set the scene for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy’s first encounter at Meryton’s assembly rooms in Pride and Prejudice (1813), and where Catherine Moreland and Henry Tilney bantered in Bath in Northanger Abbey (1817).

Austen herself frequented balls in Basingstoke and Southampton. The ballroom was the place to see and be seen, the focal point…

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