Austen's satire of Gothic fiction is set largely in Bath, where the naive heroine Catherine Morland is swept up in the social whirl of the Assembly Rooms, the Pump Room, and the crescents. The novel captures Georgian Bath at the height of its fashionable era — the rituals of the social season, the promenades, the gossip — and reading it before visiting brings the architecture to life in a way that no guidebook can.
Published posthumously in 1817, Northanger Abbey is one of Austen's shorter and funnier novels. The Bath scenes are detailed enough that you can trace Catherine's walks through streets that still look remarkably similar today.