Jane Austen: Down to the Sea exhibition

Name: Jane Austen: Down to the Sea exhibition
Start: 2025-09-14
End: 2025-09-14
Location: Dorset Museum & Art Gallery

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth in 1775 this exhibition will explore the sea as a setting for her fictional worlds and its influence on her. She loved a dip in the sea, often went there on holiday and had two brothers in the navy. Focussing on the Dorset coastal towns Jane visited or wrote about it will explore leisure, fashion, entertainment and wellbeing at the seaside. The sea as a location for romance and danger will also be revealed through imagined and real-life experiences of the people who went there. In the exhibition space, costumes will show what cutting-edge fashion both men and women were expected to show off at the seaside, as well as a pink feather cockade worn by the author. A first edition of the novel Persuasion from the author’s house in Chawton will be on display as well as local Regency guidebooks, postcards, evening dresses, paintings and games highlighting how people spent their time on holiday by the sea.

14 June – 14 September 2025

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Jane Austen: Down to the Sea exhibition

Next events

Location

Other events happening here

Pride Trail

Store Tour

Sylvia Townsend Warner & Valentine Ackland – Queer Love and Literature

No ice in Weymouth! – Eating ice cream with Jane Austen (and a bit beyond) | Dr Annie Gray

Roman Dorchester Walk

Empire, the West Country and Thomas Hardy | Corinne Fowler and Rena Jackson

Quiet Opening

‘The Shadow on the Stone’: Hardy and Archaeology | Mark Damon Chutter

Bone builders: can you construct a human skeleton?

Fraught with high tragedy: new insights on the Maiden Castle Iron Age ‘War Cemetery’ | Dr Martin Smith

Jane Austen and the Sea | Lizzie Dunford

Writing Jane Austen | Gill Hornby in Conversation with Tracy Chevalier