Literary Trails: British Writers in Their Landscapes

by Christina Hardyment

From haunting remains of castles dotting the countryside to light-flooded stretches of coast, Britain's landscapes have inspired writers from Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier to Virginia Woolf and Rudyard Kipling. Evocatively illustrated with paintings and photographs of sites made famous in classic books, Literary Trails invites readers to walk, drive, or sail through some of Britain's best-known literary landscapes, all of which have been preserved by the National Trust.

Author Christina Hardyment traces the route of Thomas Hardy's Tess across Wessex, wanders around the Lake District as Wordsworth did, and follows the path of Alfred Lord Tennyson towards Tintagel in Cornwall in quest of the Arthurian legends. Maps and archival pictures illustrate each route, and photographs show the places as they are today, making Literary Trails both a pleasure for the armchair traveller and a practical guide for anyone planning a literary journey through Britain.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Books About Books

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Christina Hardyment read history at Newnham College, Cambridge, and has twice held the Alistair Horne Historians' Writing Fellowship at St. Antony's College, Oxford. She is a writer and broadcaster with wide interests, and lives in Oxford, England.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a geographer, I love literary atlases. They are usually “coffee-table books,” as this one is, although it’s not one that will break your foot if it falls off the table – it’s 9 X 10 inches. It’s published by Britain’s National Trust so it features authors’ homes preserved by the Trust. These aren’t necessarily books that you sit down to read cover-to-cover but I enjoy skimming through them and especially looking at the maps.



Only a few chapters are dedicated to single authors (Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and Jane Austen’s Landscape). The rest are focused on regions that feature multiple authors. (Britain has so many!) A typical chapter has full-color photos of an author’s home (often interior and exterior), the landscape, a couple of historical photos of the author, perhaps writing in his or her study.

There are maybe 20 maps of trails through author country. Some by foot, car, bicycle and even one in the Lake District by boat. Hardy’s Wessex is a 60 mile trail that you can do by foot, bicycle or car. (Looks like rain, I think we’ll take the car. LOL.) We get details including where to park.

Bloomsbury by the Sea focuses on Monk’s House in Somerset, Virginia Woolf’s home for 20 years. Most of the prose is focused on the expansion of the house itself and what books the author sold that enabled her to renovate or build various additions. (A House of One’s Own.)

There’s a 4-mile walking tour of Bath featuring sites in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The chapter, Scene of the Crime, tells and shows us sites of works by many lesser-known authors, but also major ones like Conan Doyle and Daphne du Maurier. Tennyson’s (and others’) musings about King Arthur sites are on a 3-mile walking tour of Glastonbury or a 30-mile car tour.



A good book that has all the essentials of what a literary atlas should be.

NOTE the two illustrations are not from the book.
Top, Monk's House from nationaltrust.org.uk
Map of Dorset's Thomas Hardy trails from lymeregis.com

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was not as good as the author's Heidi's Alp. It wasn't clearly focussed. She would give some background on an author and where they lived or wrote about. There would be a little insert on walking tours but it isn't an engaging work.
I did not finish this book.