Basically, you can’t
tell chicken fodder from good literature (or maybe you are just a terrible
bore) if you don’t like Jane Austen. And I believe there isn’t a place more
iconic, more Austen-esque in its spirit than five maple trees standing in the
centre of a grassy lawn, surrounded by four orbed houses and creating the
perfect architectural circle called The Circus.
The place is situated
in Bath (where else?), and it has more magic per square metre than any number
of Roman baths or Assembly rooms or striking abbeys.
The Circus, a name as
unbecoming as it is fantastic, seems a place you wish to encircle right until
the moment you drop dead from dizziness and exhaustion. It has all the poetry
and charming simplicity and desperation of Austen’s prose, once so brilliantly
captured by Sally Hawkins’s character in the most dramatic scene of Persuasion and perhaps the whole of
English literature of the period.
