Sophie Andrews was 16 when she discovered Jane Austen’s novels. Handed Pride and Prejudice as a GCSE text, she was drawn into what has, today, become her all-consuming passion, involving regular Austen-themed holidays, trips to National Trust properties in Regency dress, and as many balls as possible.

“I was the only one in the class who enjoyed it and I felt I was I was the only person in the world who loved Jane Austen as much as I did,” says Andrews, who is now 22 and owns more than 100 editions of Pride and Prejudice alone. Less than a year later, she discovered the true extent of Austen fandom online. She started her own blog, and visited the Jane Austen festival in Bath, where she met a group of like-minded people and formed the Jane Austen Pineapple Appreciation Society. “We organised a picnic towards the end of the festival, and two of us said, a bit offhand, wouldn’t it be fun if we all had a house party together?”

That house party has now become an annual event, as part of the society’s year-round calendar of Austen-themed social engagements – the Bath Austen festival, an Austen Regency meetup each June, and balls, which are held on a regular basis throughout England. (“You could probably find a ball every two to three weeks, it’s huge,” says Andrews.)

The couple dozen in the society are mostly women, and a handful of men. Their day jobs range from doctor to opera singer, biochemist to publisher, but they unite to wear Regency outfits whenever they’re together. Entertainment for their holidays – carefully planned in advance – will range from dances (“We have someone in our group who can call. We roll back the carpet and have great fun!”), to musical evenings and trips to local National Trust properties (in costume, of course).

They are not, stresses Andrews, re-enactors. “We like to have non-historically accurate fun,” she says. Cards Against Humanity, she points out, is “very un-Regency”, but they’ve designed their own version, and think Austen herself might have enjoyed their games. “She was quite a cynical person really and had a real sense of humour, a wry wit.”

Photographer Alejandra Carles-Tolra came across the society after noticing a group of Regency-clad people in Bath three years ago. Her work explores groups and the individuals who make them up, so when she found Andrews and her friends, she wanted to find out more.

I wanted to know and understand why they wanted to dress up as 19th-century women Alejandra

Carles-Tolra has spent days and days embedded with the society, attending their balls, following them around small English villages in their Regency attire, joining them on their getaways. Her new work, Where We Belong, which was enabled by a Jerwood/Photoworks award, explores themes of “belonging, femininity and escapism” through the Austen fans.

“It was fascinating to me to think, ‘Why would these women want to adopt an identity from the 19th century?’ It felt to me like going back,” she says. “I wanted to know and understand why they wanted to dress up as 19th-century women.”

As Andrews explains it, it’s about “escaping for a week”, to somewhere where “people don’t get their phones out”. “We have a break from the news and everything that’s going on in the real world and have fun and spend time with like-minded people. It’s not quite that you wish you were in the Regency period, with the lack of antibiotics and painkillers and sanitary toilets … It’s about finding people who appreciate the same things we do,” she says. “There is something in the world she creates, an old-fashioned feeling, the manners, the way women were treated by men … It was a very different world than it is today, and there is something very appealing in that.”

We have a break from the news and the real world and have fun and spend time with like-minded people Sophie

It’s also about the support of the group. “The majority of them don’t feel that comfortable on their own in Regency clothes, but when they get together with the group it’s like, ‘Now I want to look like I’m mad, now I’m totally fine’,” Carles-Tolra says.

After spending time with the society, Carles-Tolra (not an Austen fan herself) realised that many of them found Austen at a time when they were struggling – either with health, or confidence: “Jane Austen’s books became a form of escapism – they could go into this world where, in a very simple way, the good girl gets the good boy and everything is solved.”

Andrews fell in love with Austen during a difficult period at school, which coincided with serious health problems in her family. “Jane’s novels became a perfect place for me to escape into, and forget my real world for a few hours,” she says. “She really was my lifeline through the tough few years I had, and continued to be as my own health has suffered in recent years as well, and she has continued to be there for me and to allow me to imagine myself as Lizzy Bennet. She creates a very happy world for us to imagine ourselves in. As she said herself in one of her novels, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’”

Andrews once hid her love for Austen because “it wasn’t cool”; now she says that everyone in the society draws off of each others’ confidence, and no one worries about what other people think. “If you’re walking around in a Regency dress in February people do think, ‘OK, you must be mad, it’s freezing’,” she says. “But generally it’s positive, people just think we’re celebrating something we all enjoy, having fun together.”