It won’t take much Persuasion for fans of Jane Austen to take in a new exhibition highlighting her relationship with the sea – and how she used it in her classic novels. The famed author’s sea bathing, Regency styles for fashion and entertainment, and holidays in resorts including Lyme Regis, are explored at Dorset Museum & Art Gallery in Dorchester from Saturday.
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of her birth, Jane Austen: Down to the Sea, brings together personal items such as her clothes and interactive installations to shed light on how the South Coast influenced her writing. Born in Steventon, Hampshire, in 1775, she wrote six novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion, which was partly set in Dorset seaside resort Lyme Regis and published in 1817.
Lucy Johnston, the museum’s exhibitions manager, said: “Jane loved a dip in the sea and she went to Lyme Regis on holiday in about 1804. She wrote a letter to her sister, Cassandra, saying how she’d been feeling ill and she went into the sea and it made her feel so much better.
“But then on another day she stayed in the water too long and she got a bit tired, and so she wasn’t going for a swim the next day.”
Lucy added: “And it’s just really nice because we can have exactly the same experience staying in the water too long, but now people just run in and dip in the sea as cold-water swimmers.
“But then Jane would have gone in on a bathing hut drawn by a horse, with dippers to help her in and out the water.” Part of the display features reconstructions of what might have been seen at the seaside at the time, created by local college students.
Lucy said: “Making the exhibition we were really inspired by the connection Jane Austen had to the sea and she visited all these places, from Sidmouth to Lyme Regis and Worthing. She loved the sea and she had two brothers who were in the Navy.”
● For more details about the exhibition at the museum in High West Street, Dorchester, which will be open daily from Saturday, June 14, to September 14, visit dorsetmuseum.org