Famous Writers' Houses

[Paul Whybrow]

While fantasy shopping for property in Cornwall, where I live, I came across this house in Zennor, in the west of the county.

Hmm, thinks I, D.H. Lawrence lived there for a while: sure enough, it turns out to be the same place.

Check out this property for sale on Rightmove!

The house name RANANIM comes from the utopian artistic community that he dreamed of establishing in Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda lived in Cornwall from 1916-1917, during which time he worked on Women in Love, which may have been influenced by a homosexual affair he was rumoured to have had with a local farmer. The couple were forced to leave the county, after accusations that they were signalling German submarines by semaphore system using their curtains at night.

Perhaps, it isn't surprising that there was suspicion about them, for, amazingly enough, Frieda was the fifth cousin, once removed, of Baron Manfred Von Richthofen—the Red Baron—who'd already shot down scores of British planes over the trenches.

Helen Dunmore's first novel, Zennor in Darkness, was about this period

Incidentally, should any of you be shocked by the £360,000 asking price (about $479,088) of RANANIM, let me say that it's not untypical of Cornwall, which is rapidly becoming a county blighted with second and holiday homes. Many houses lie empty for much of the year, local shops close down and most locals can't afford to buy homes here as prices have become inflated; increasingly, youngsters are leaving the area. Any house with a decent sea view is immediately worth at least £50,000 more than its equivalent inland, and because of it being Lawrence's old rented home another £50,000 has been added. Hopefully, a local author will buy it, but it's more likely to become the occasional weekend retreat of a London banker.

I've only visited one famous author's home, which is George Bernard Shaw's house Shaw's Corner, located in the small village of Ayot Saint Lawrence in the county of Hertfordshire. Shaw was known for his ascetic ways, and his home reflects this, for though the garden is beautiful, the rooms have a strictly functional sparseness. My favourite feature was his revolving work hut at the bottom of the lawn, which he could turn away to face the hedge, blocking the world out.

Have any of you visited houses with a literary connection, or lived somewhere famed for a well-known writer?

 

[Amber]

The house is kind of cute and the revolving hut, adorable if claustrophobic.

No, I haven't been hardly anywhere and so haven't seen any authors homes.

 

[Quillwitch]

While fantasy shopping for property in Cornwall, where I live, I came across this house in Zennor, in the west of the county.

Hmm, thinks I, D.H. Lawrence lived there for a while: sure enough, it turns out to be the same place.

Check out this property for sale on Rightmove!

The house name RANANIM comes from the utopian artistic community that he dreamed of establishing in Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda lived in Cornwall from 1916-1917, during which time he worked on Women in Love, which may have been influenced by a homosexual affair he was rumoured to have had with a local farmer. The couple were forced to leave the county, after accusations that they were signalling German submarines by semaphore system using their curtains at night.

Perhaps, it isn't surprising that there was suspicion about them, for, amazingly enough, Frieda was the fifth cousin, once removed, of Baron Manfred Von Richthofen—the Red Baron—who'd already shot down scores of British planes over the trenches.

Helen Dunmore's first novel, Zennor in Darkness, was about this period

Incidentally, should any of you be shocked by the £360,000 asking price (about $479,088) of RANANIM, let me say that it's not untypical of Cornwall, which is rapidly becoming a county blighted with second and holiday homes. Many houses lie empty for much of the year, local shops close down and most locals can't afford to buy homes here as prices have become inflated; increasingly, youngsters are leaving the area. Any house with a decent sea view is immediately worth at least £50,000 more than its equivalent inland, and because of it being Lawrence's old rented home another £50,000 has been added. Hopefully, a local author will buy it, but it's more likely to become the occasional weekend retreat of a London banker.

I've only visited one famous author's home, which is George Bernard Shaw's house Shaw's Corner, located in the small village of Ayot Saint Lawrence in the county of Hertfordshire. Shaw was known for his ascetic ways, and his home reflects this, for though the garden is beautiful, the rooms have a strictly functional sparseness. My favourite feature was his revolving work hut at the bottom of the lawn, which he could turn away to face the hedge, blocking the world out.

Have any of you visited houses with a literary connection, or lived somewhere famed for a well-known writer?

Why can´t we all have one of these?

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Nice! And significantly cheaper than houses around here. One of my husband's colleagues has a revolving 'retreat' on his property. You can sit on a couch inside and crank it to turn it around. His is to take advantage of the sun, not to block the world out by facing a hedge. Apparently he and his wife lived in it for a couple of weeks after the 2010 earthquakes while their house was being repaired. They claimed it was quite lovely (though VERY small).

 

[Geoff]

Close by, about four mile away, is Gad's Hill Place, where Dickens wrote Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, A Tale of Two Cities and the unfinished novel Edwin Drood. He died there in 1870.

 

[MaryA]

Pored over those images of Rananim, @Paul Whybrow . That is where Katherine Mansfield and the odious John Middleton Murray came down to stay and witnessed the terrible fights between Frieda and Lawrence. Some of that went into Lawrence's Women in Love.

I went to look at Dickens' home in 48 Doughty Street in a July heatwave in 2006. It was smaller than I had expected and stifling, hardly enough room for people to pass one another on the stairs. The room where Dickens' young sister-in-law died, Dickens' study, the dining room etc filled with brass, busts, Victoriana, wingback chairs. Claustrophobic.

Brief pilgrimages too to Haworth parsonage (the graveyard so close!), Dove Cottage in the Lake District (I think I prefer Dorothy's diary to most of Wordsworth's poetry), Capel-y-ffin on the Welsh Borders where wicked Eric Gill had his studio in the 1920s. Daffodils, incest and calligraphy.

I stopped outside Lady Ottoline Morrell's townhouse in Bloomsbury. Stood outside the poet HD's home in Kensington, across the courtyard from where Ezra Pound stayed.

[There's more but I'm starting to feel like a bluestocking stalker.]

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Not these days; not really something I do anymore, or country houses either. I've also visited the Bronte Parsonage at Haworth; it's about an hour's drive from where I live. We had our younger baby daughter in tow on one occasion and she pooped in her nappy, an utter stinker, precipitating an ignominious retreat, more promptly than we would have wished.


My mother feels the parlour has a presence. Back to the ghosts again...but the place is more than a mausoleum. They host writer's events there.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Pored over those images of Rananim, @Paul Whybrow . That is where Katherine Mansfield and the odious John Middleton Murray came down to stay and witnessed the terrible fights between Frieda and Lawrence. Some of that went into Lawrence's Women in Love.

I went to look at Dickens' home in 48 Doughty Street in a July heatwave in 2006. It was smaller than I had expected and stifling, hardly enough room for people to pass one another on the stairs. The room where Dickens' young sister-in-law died, Dickens' study, the dining room etc filled with brass, busts, Victoriana, wingback chairs. Claustrophobic.

Brief pilgrimages too to Haworth parsonage (the graveyard so close!), Dove Cottage in the Lake District (I think I prefer Dorothy's diary to most of Wordsworth's poetry), Capel-y-ffin on the Welsh Borders where wicked Eric Gill had his studio in the 1920s. Daffodils, incest and calligraphy.

I stopped outside Lady Ottoline Morrell's townhouse in Bloomsbury. Stood outside the poet HD's home in Kensington, across the courtyard from where Ezra Pound stayed.

[There's more but I'm starting to feel like a bluestocking stalker.]

Zennor has an interesting church called Saint Senara, which is at least 1400 years old, with a carved pew that celebrates one of Cornwall's many tales of myth and legend The Mermaid of Zennor.

I lived in Portsmouth for several years, where Charles Dickens' birthplace was a popular attraction. He only lived there for three years, as it was a temporary posting for his father in his job as a pay clerk for the navy, though he based the eponymous character of Dombey and Son on a rigger friend of his father who worked in the dockyard.

The attention Dickens' home receives is nothing compared to 221b Baker Street, the fictional home of a fictional detective Sherlock Holmes—an amazing number of people think that he was a real man—perhaps that's something we should all attempt as writers....Hordes of tourists choke the pavements, risking being squashed as they pose for photographs beside and on the one-way racetrack that is Baker Street. I worked at Marylebone Public Library, about a quarter-mile from 221b, and the ornate Victorian library building attracted many tourists on the trail of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle's novels were regularly stolen. Madame Tussauds Wax Museum is located beside Baker Street tube station and naturally, honours the detective in what they call The Sherlock Holmes Experience.

Daphne Du Maurier is an entrenched part of the Cornish tourist industry. Jamaica Inn thrives because of the number of coaches bearing holidaymakers that visit every day in summer. It's a very different pub in winter when it returns to being the local boozer for farmers and villagers of the bleak moor. Apart from having a smugglers' museum, there's a gift shop that trades heavily on Du Maurier's work. I dare say, there'll be more lesbian tourists visiting, following the recent publication of a startling biography about her love life.

The dark side of Daphne du Maurier | Daily Mail Online

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Very likely. Hebden Bridge is like that, on account of Sylvia Plath's grave up the hill in Heptonstall.

Zennor/Senara...word root is the same thing, I'm guessing...