The famous authors of England tour

For the inveterate reader of English novels, plays, essays and poetry, a trip to the homeland setting of the authors who continue to inspire is a joyous occasion. When I first visited England in the eighties, I was amazed to discover that a whole trip could be planned with the purpose in mind of visiting the sites made famous in literature. Whether it was to visit the author’s homes, universities, or famous places of work and play, or to unearth scenes and settings they had written about, visiting Great Britain with this focus in mind is a breeze with the help offered by the British Tourist Authority, and a thrilling experience to boot.

The primary document which helped me plan my trip and several since then is their brochure, The Literary Trail, which highlights and spotlights various locations in Britain which will add to your appreciation of the written English word. This small pamphlet helped us criss-cross Britain with an eye out for sites that enrich our reading experience even now. Accompanying literature, such as B&B brochures or online sites, helped us select lodging in most of the areas we visited.

Haworth is filled with pictures of the writers and their family, and many of the original furnishings. It is easy to imagine, when you’re there, the strictures placed on the lives of these brilliant women by a rigid Protestant upbringing. Rereading their books since the trip there has helped me to place scenes and atmospheres with great accuity. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, and Emily’s Wuthering Heights remain two of the finest English novels ever written, and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall deserves further investigation. These books seemed to have been written at Haworth, on the very furniture one can see and almost tuch today.

Just above Yorkshire and Haworth is the famous English Lake District. One year our plans revolved around this beautiful area, home at one time or another to Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and others. Wordsworth, born in Cockermouth near the western coast of England, paprticularly left a fascinating trail of sites which are being cared for by the National Trust, the Wordsworth Trust and others, and are in magnificent shape. In the Cockermouth home of his birth, many personal effects of the author as a child and young man are dispolayed on 18th century furnishings in the Georgian home. His childhood garden and terrace walk can also be seen, and informative video enriches the experience.

Even more rich with Wordsworth memoirs is his Dove Cottage in Grasmere, where he lived with his sister Dorothy, and where he completed The Prelude and Ode:Intimations on Immortality, undoubtedly two of his finest works. Set in a grassy hillside, with charming gardens evocative of the past and of Wordsworth’s own sonnets such as The Daffodil, Dove Cottage offers guidied tours, and follows the life of the poet as recorded in the journals of his sister. The attached award-winning Wordsworth museum ill;ustrates the poet’s life and work with actual manuscripts, portraits and memorabilia.

At Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s last home in the Lake District until his death in 1850, one senses the incursion of worldy concerns that drove the poet to accept postal work to support his growing family. Rydal Mount is a small cottage in Ambleside, a quaint village between Grassmere and Cockermouth, and it is more simply furnished than either. But it is also rich in histry, and exhibits concern not only Wordsworth’s work, but that of the many other literary figures who visited and even lived with him there, such as Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott and others. Memorabilia is nicely arranged. A sense of the whole romantic period pervades the Wordsworth spaces, giving the visitor a sense of the generous heart and warm sentiments as well as sufferings of the writers who lived in those times.

Also prominent in the Lake District are signs of Beatrix Potter who farmed there, raising sheep as well as creating her fanciful children’s stories about animals and good deeds. You can visit her home, filled with authentic furnishings, see what views she enjoyed as she conducted her farming work, and then a few miles away attend the Beatrix Potter’s Lake District show in Keswick. There, mementos and a fine, 16-minute film bring vividly to life another side of Ms. Potter, in addition to her Peter Rabbit stories and fancies. Potter’s work for conservation of Lake District lands led to her donation of her own home, Hill Top Farm, to the National Trust, which maintains it to this day.

Our choice in the Lake District was to stay in in an out-of-the-way huge old inn on the western shore of Lake Windemere. In fact, it was a stone's throw from the little castle. Wray Castle, that first intrigued Beatrix Potter and drew her to the Lake District.

Heading south out of the Lake District, we traveled through the countryside made famous by James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small and other young adult and adult titles, and could return to the author’s books with the scenes of green, jutting hills, rocky outcroppings and sprawling, modest farms spread far apart in this scrabby landscape. Heading toward Nottingham, one can find the home of D. H. Lawrence, in the crowded, tightly woven streets of Eastwood, setting for the author’s first and perhaps greatest novel, Sons and Lovers. Eastwood’s proximity to the coalfields, and to the routes of the first great railroad lines, deeply affected the characters in Lawrence’s stories, and obviously, the author’s life, as well. The small, terraced cottage where Lawrence was born, another cottage nearby where heis family lived for a few years and where he set his breakout novel, are open for visitors, and kept furnished as they would have been at the turn of the century.

Nearby is the quite different homestead of the great romantic poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron. The ancestral home of Byron, Newstead Abbey, with its magnificent gardens and hundreds of acres of huge blooming rhododendrums, is a far cry from the tiny home and cramped atmosphere of D. H. Lawrence. But life was not all sweetness and light for the crippled, handsome but devilish Byron heir. The story of his tragic life and amazing work is told through countless exhibits in the magnificent abbey, with some of the rooms and their gothic overtones reminding us of the dark influences on Byron’s work.

Continue to travel south and to the center of England and the epicenter of the English literary world.Stratford –upon-Avon, of course, offers a total Shakespeare experience, often bordering on a theme park atmosphere, because of the many tourists in tow. But don’t let that keep you from Stratford, for there is much of charm and quality in the sights there, and plenty to enrich your understanding and appreciation of the Bard.

You will visit Shakespeare’s birthplace, filled with mementos of his life, travel to Ann Hathaway’s cottage with its thatched roof and even to Shakespeare’s school and church which are still in use in Stratford. Most importantly you will hopefully visit the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for one of his plays. A schedule of several plays, tragedies, histories and comedies, rotate throughout the summer, or roughly, from May to October, allowing the visitor the opportunity to see several plays on one short visit. Around the corner from the Royal, the Swan Theatre, built pretty much as a replica of the Globe, where Shakespeare’s plays were often performed in London, and which has recently been rebuilt and reopened as a facsimile of the old Globe, provides backstage tours, costume handling, and a helpful lectures on aspects of Shakespearian drama.

Your next Shakespeare play will be the richer for your time in Stratford, and the experience of walking where young Will walked, dining in an ancient pub where perhaps the young Shakespeare himself dined on the battered wooden tables, is an overwhelming one.

Traveling south into Dorset, just before Devon and Cornwall, your final stop might well be a visit to the countryside made vivid by Thomas Hardy in his groundbreaking modern novels such as Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. This is green, rounded hill country, covered with lolling sheep and expansive heath, with a network of small farms and garden lanes knitting together the widespread outposts. In Dorset you can visit the Hardy cottage, preserved by the National Trust, where the young man grew up, wrote his first tentative stories and poems in his attic room, and courted the girl he loved in the nearby lanes. A museum in the town of Dorchester holds many Hardy exhibits and treasures.

For a touching final stop, visit the cemetery where Hardy asked to be buried at the Stinsford Church. You can walk there unencumbered by other tourists or admission fees, and contemplate the resting place of one of the world’s greatest novelists—or at least, of his heart. For although Hardy’s ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, as were the remains of countless other great literary figures, his heart was buried at Stinsford, according to his wishes. This seems a touching tribute by one of the first truly modern writers to a place that so informed his work, and a true sign that setting, and getting to see and know these famous settings firsthand, is a wonderful way to appreciate literature and travel all at once.Staying in a farm B&B in the area provides an excellent taste of Hardyesque surroundings.

On future literary tours plan to visit Westminster Abbey itself, and perhaps some more modern literary outposts, such as the area in Cornwall written about by Daphne duMaurier in Rebecca, or Bloomsbury in London, home of a whole literary movement, or the Dickens birthplace and museum in Sussex, or Dylan Thomas haunting home in the south of Wales. The paths are endless, and the British Tourist Authority a great help.