Literary Britain : Exploring southern England and Wales, including visits to the homes of Henry James, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors. --Samuel Johnson

Great Britain has produced more than its share of great poets and novelists, and it is easily possible to visit their homes, to walk the country lanes they trod, to stay in their towns and villages, which now abound with bed and breakfast signs . . . and to relive the scenes they described so vividly.

Although guided tours are available, my husband and I found it more exciting--and less expensive--to strike off on our own, not knowing what adventures the day would bring, to discover the “scept’red isle” of our imagination that we first encountered in books.

Last summer, after a rainy five days in London, we rented a car and headed south in search of sunshine and literary sites, staying where and when the mood willed.

We agreed that our first destination should be Henry James’ home, Lamb House, in Rye, East Sussex. It was a logical place to start, bridging the transition from America to England with the Boston expatriate who became a British citizen. Besides, we wanted to spend our first night with a view of the English Channel.

After escaping the motorway to the quieter pace of a “single carriageway,” we approached Rye with some dismay. This once-flourishing island town, one of the original Cinque Ports, was actually two miles inland, due to silting of the harbor in the 16th Century. But the ancient hilly town, with its cobbled streets, was still delightful, despite the proliferation of souvenir shops.

We stopped at a bookshop and inquired about a good place to stay and have dinner. The clerk suggested the Mermaid Inn, an old smugglers’ haunt dating from 1420. We took her advice and were charmed by the graceful decor, the many antiques and the mullioned windows. We ordered drinks by the huge fireplace, then treated ourselves to a traditional dinner of roast beef, jacket potatoes and Yorkshire pudding.

Next we set out to explore the historic older section of town. Then, precisely at the opening hour of 2 p.m., we wound our way up West Street to the top of the hill, where we confronted a solidly respectable, brick-fronted Georgian house.

A tall door admitted us to a paneled entrance hall, where a woman at a desk accepted our admission fee. Her family was privileged to rent Lamb House from the National Trust, she told us, and it was with pride and a certain proprietary air that she showed the house to visitors.

Naturally, we first wanted to see the study where James dictated his novels to his secretary. Alas, the Garden Room where he worked in summer had been destroyed by a German bomb in 1940, but we were welcome to browse in the Green Room, his winter writing room. Adjacent to it was a bedroom known as the King’s Room because George I occupied it in 1726.

The Green Room was smaller than we would have thought and crowded with mementos, photographs and books--reminders of James’ company of literary friends: Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane and Ford Madox Ford, all of whom had homes nearby and were frequent visitors.

As we wandered about the house and the walled garden with its paths and lawn, its flowers and fruit trees, it was easy to see why James had fallen in love with it. He wrote: “The quiet, essential amiability of Lamb House only deepens with experience . . . All the good things that I hoped of the place have, in fact, properly bloomed and flourished here.” From 1897 until James’ death in 1916 he wrote six novels here, among them “The Ambassadors,” “The Wings of the Dove” and “The Golden Bowl.”

We thanked the current tenant, wishing we could trade places with her, but we had “promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep.” The following day we saw Rudyard Kipling’s home, Bateman’s, another National Trust property, in nearby Burwash, another East Sussex village.

The village had little to offer in the way of bed and breakfast, but we did find a farmhouse on the outskirts. The bed was concave, but no matter. We were served a rousing breakfast of bacon, bangers, fried tomatoes, toast and marmalade. After a hike through the countryside we drove the short distance to Bateman’s, arriving at the opening hour, 11 a.m.

We were impressed by the tall-chimneyed stone mansion with its grand entryway and extensive grounds, where Kipling lived from 1902 until his death in 1936. All this from the fruits of his pen.

The living quarters were staid and unimaginative, unlike the man, reflecting solid middle-class respectability.

Only in his upstairs study did he seem to take flight. There was his globe of the world, his maps, his books, his paintings, his guns, his sabers, his treasures from India. His view through large, leaded windows was of misty gardens and the countryside beyond. This was the ideal writer’s workroom. Quiet, secluded.

Our next destination lay to the west and promised a distinct contrast. After the vigor and thunder of Kipling, the international range of his writing, we were to visit the home of a quiet spinster who cooked and cleaned and sewed and rarely traveled beyond her tiny village. That such a confined life could produce elegant prose which ranks with the best in English literature is an enduring miracle.

Jane Austen lived in a modest brick house in the Hampshire village of Chawton 15 miles northeast of Winchester, where she wrote the final versions of her six novels from 1805 to 1817. It bore little resemblance to the country manor we had imagined. Her bedroom was cramped, the other rooms unprepossessing.

Standing in front of a smallish fireplace in the living room, it was impossible to conceive that here she had written her novels secretively on scraps of paper.

She was buried in Winchester Cathedral. There, the brass tablet makes no mention of her novels, describing her only as the daughter of a respected local family.

Thomas Hardy’s cottage in the county of Dorset--a half-day’s drive west--was next on our list, and we doubted that he would be recalled merely as the son of a respected local family. Quite the contrary. Dorchester, where he lived and worked, and the neighboring hamlet of Higher Bockhampton where he was born, celebrate his genius with unabashed pride.

There is a Hardy statue, a Hardy Room in the museum, guides to his imaginary county of Wessex. Hotels, restaurants and streets are named after the characters and settings in his novels. A National Trust gift shop overflows with his prose and poetry.

Max Gate, the home in Dorchester where Hardy spent his mature years, is not open to the public, so we drove three miles northeast of the city to the cottage where he lived until he was 30. The approach from the car park was a 10-minute walk through Thorncombe Wood to a picture-post card thatched cottage and a garden in riotous bloom.

Hardy was born in 1840 in this house built by his grandfather, who, like his father, was a stonemason. Hardy walked to school in Dorchester, which he called Casterbridge in his novels.

At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to an architect and later pursued his architectural studies in London. After marrying, he moved to various towns to work on projects, finally returning in his 40s to Dorchester, where he died in 1928.

The interior of Hardy’s cottage is less attractive than the exterior. The rooms are small, with low ceilings. A steep staircase leads upstairs and, in a tiny bedroom overlooking the garden, is the deep window seat where he wrote “Under the Greenwood Tree” and “Far from the Madding Crowd.”

We took a different walk back to our car. Lazing along fragrant country lanes, passing houses with signs offering eggs, herbs and honey, we reveled in Hardy’s landscape. We were tempted to gather wildflowers, but they would wilt long before we arrived that evening at the elegant country hotel where, for once, we had made reservations. We were to be guests that night in the former home of William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy.

It was a circuitous route to Alfoxton Park, near Holford in Somerset. In this handsome, two-story Queen Anne country house, Wordsworth began his great creative period in 1797-98.

Amid 50 acres of woodland set in a hollow of the Quantock Hills, Alfoxton had everything. Even the modern swimming pool and tennis court did not detract from the tranquillity. Quince vines climbed the white walls. Herb and vegetable gardens flourished. Chicken, geese, pigs, sheep and cattle were raised in adjoining pens and fields for the hotel’s kitchen.

The bar was a wondrously inviting, dark-paneled room that had once been Wordsworth’s study. As the tables filled, a wispy elderly woman paused uncertainly at the empty chair beside us. We invited her to join us.

She was a Bristol University professor researching a book on Wordsworth, and she regaled us with stories about William and Dorothy. They had moved to Alfoxton to be near Samuel Coleridge, who lived three miles away in Nether Stowey.

Coleridge’s cottage was now a museum, according to the professor. There he wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” It was a happy time for him, all too brief in his tormented life.

Wales was our next stop. That mythic land of lilting voices, song and fable had long appealed to us and we were eager to explore the countryside described by its most famous poet, Dylan Thomas.

Caught in a twilight traffic jam in Swansea, we barely made it before dark to 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, where the poet was born in 1914 and spent his first 20 years. The house is not open to the public, so we hurried on to the nearby seaside resort area, called The Mumbles, and the Mermaid Hotel, a drinking haunt of Thomas’, where we planned to spend the night.

Thomas’ carousing was legendary. An ancient barmaid at the Mermaid had known the poet. “A loud, rough sort,” she said, “but he could charm the birds out of the trees.”

The next morning we drove to Laugharne (pronounced Larn), celebrated as Llareggub in “Under Milkwood.” It is a weathered town built on a hill slope, with streets leading down to an old harbor. Thomas loved the town when he first saw it in 1934, and kept returning there, spending the last 4 1/2 years of his life at The Boathouse with his wife, Caitlin.

To fortify ourselves for the half-mile walk to The Boathouse we stopped at Brown’s Hotel, the poet’s favorite pub, for a Buckley Best Bitter. The publican had been a friend of Dylan’s and pointed out the table in the corner where he and Caitlin always sat--and argued.

We found our way to Dylan’s Walk just outside town, and paused at his writing shed. The former garage, which he called “My Shack,” was sparsely furnished with a deal table and chairs. But the view across the estuary was spectacular.

Farther along the path, The Boathouse--”my seashaken house on a breakneck of rocks”--seemed to grow out of the cliff face. It has been almost too lovingly restored by the Carmarthen District Council with some of the original furnishings. The orderly rooms are out of character. One cannot imagine the untidy, temperamental Thomases staging one of their classic brawls in such immaculate surroundings.

We browsed in the book shop, studied the photographic display in the bedrooms and stopped for tea and Welsh cakes in the former dining room. Later, standing in front of his grave in the town’s St. Martin’s churchyard, we were surprised by the simple wording of the inscription on the white cross--”In Memory of Dylan Thomas, died November 9, 1953. RIP”

It lacked a poet’s touch:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Laugharne was the westernmost point and the last stop on our literary odyssey. Time to head back to Heathrow, drop off the car and await our flight to Los Angeles. As we sped along the M4 our minds, like Robert Browning’s in his poem, shifted to “Home Thoughts, from Abroad.”

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Literary tour stops:

Lamb House, West Street, Rye, East Sussex. Open April through October, Wednesday and Saturday, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Admission 1 pound. The Mermaid Inn, Mermaid Street, Rye, East Sussex. Rooms: double, including breakfast 35 to 45 pounds. Two-night package, including dinner, 45 pounds per person a night.

Bateman’s, half a mile south of Burwash, East Sussex. Open March 24 to Oct. 31 daily, except Thursday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: adults 2.50 pounds, Children 1.30 pounds. Weekends and bank holidays: adults 2.80 pounds, children 1.40 pounds.

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, Hampshire. Open daily, April to October, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; November through March, open daily except Monday and Tuesday, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission: 1 pound.

Hardy’s Cottage, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset. Admission free to garden only, daily. Easter to Oct. 30, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday, 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Entry (1.50 pounds) must be prearranged with tenant. Write: The Custodian, Hardy’s Cottage, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset.

Alfoxton Park, Holford, Bridgwater, Somerset. Bed and breakfast plus dinner, 31-36 pounds per person; bed and breakfast only, 26-31 pounds.

The Dylan Thomas Boathouse Museum, Laugharne, Dyfed, Wales. Open daily, Easter to Nov. 9, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: adults 80 pence, children 40 pence. The Mermaid Hotel, 688 Mumbles Road, Mumbles, Swansea, Wales. Single room and breakfast 18 to 26 pounds; double, including breakfast, 32 pounds.