When Jane Austen came to Dawlish

Jane Austen came to Dawlish in 1802 on a long holiday - the town was very well-known at the time as a place people would go to to restore their health.

In fact, the Bishop of Exeter in the story of the Parson and Clerk came to the town for this exact reason.

Unfortunately, we don't know exactly what kind of impression the town left on her, but she did comment on the library at the time, calling it 'pitiful' and 'wretched' in a letter to her niece in 1814.

When her characters came to the town

Even though she was unimpressed by the library, the town still features multiple times in her book Sense and Sensibility.

In short, the book is about a family that has to downsize from its country estate to a cottage in Devon after the father dies, and the young women have to look for suitors to escape poverty.

When the eldest sister Elinor is talking to a man at a party, he asks where she is currently residing, and is surprised to hear that her cottage is not near Dawlish.

Moreover, the same man later marries and settles down in the town, and the young couple spend months of 'great happiness at Dawlish'.

Despite the fact that he is admittedly one of the villains of the book as he is extremely vain and steals his brother's ex-fiancée (an oversimplification, but you get the picture), Dawlish certainly made enough of an impression on Austen for her to mention the town multiple times in the novel, and to characterise it as somewhere the aristocracy and landed gentry would want to go.

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