Literary Tours of England

Helen led a number of literary tours through England

England Through the Eyes of Literary Women

JUNE 11-25 1983 & June 2-16 1984

Rooted in “one, dear, particular place,” the writings of women have often been connected with specific localities. Many of the most important works of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Frances Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dorothy Sayers, and Virginia Woolf have deep and abiding associations with English villages, cities, and countryside. This tour will concentrate on these notable English women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries through travel to significant landmarks connected with their works. Participants on the tour will have an opportunity to study these writers in literary and geographical context, exploring how the sense of p lace permeates English fiction.

Arriving in London, the tour will move first to the fields and buildings of Harrow and Heckfield, touring these villages and studying Frances Trollope’s connections with them. Moving on to the Georgian splendor of Bath, participants will see the old city and the countryside, houses and halls crucial to an understanding of Jane Austen. From Bath, the group will proceed to the Midlands and a study of George Eliot, driving though characteristic English villages en route to Arbury Hall, and its South Farm, where Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans. Moving north, participants will visit Knutsford, model for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, and Styal Park, a restored factory setting, where women, industrialism, and the 19th century factory novel will be a major focus.

Three days will be reserved for Haworth in Yorkshire, home of the Brontës and inspiration for all their novels. Participants will visit the parsonage where the sisters and their brother lived and wrote. There will be time for walks on the moors of Wuthering Heights and visits to the village church. Visits to other buildings and halls central to the Brontë novels will be arranged. From Haworth, the tour will move south to Oxford, rich in history, architecture, and works of art.

Returning to London for two days, participants will walk in the city inextricably linked with Virginia Woolf and vitally connected with all the writes on the tour. There will be time for Bloomsbury as well as excursions to the two great houses, Sissinghurst Castle and Knole, central to the work and artistic vision of Woolf., the most modern and the most urbane of the writers studied on this trip.

Lakeland, seaside, and country

England as Literary Inspiration from Wordsworth to hardy

June 10-24, 1986

This study tour will reunite a group of nineteenth-century authors with their particular landscapes. Tracing the connections between place and literature, the group will visit first the transcendental scenery of the English Lake District, the most beautiful corner of England, to view scenes that gave restoration and spiritual inspiration to the major Romantic writers Wordsworth and Coleridge. Here, in the midst of lake, moor, and mountain, participants will encounter what Coleridge called “the sudden loveliness of the world.” They will visit sites associated with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in Hawkshead, Grasmere (Dove Cottage), and Rydal Mount, his home from 1813 to 1850. The group will visit Ruskin’s Brantwood and Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s home at Sawrey, set amid 4,000 acres of National Trust property. There will also be a cruise on Coniston Water. Another focus of the tour will be the West Country, Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex.” No writer in Britain has so precisely defined his territory as Hardy. In Dorset, the heartland of his Wessex novels, participants will visit the real places where, under fictitious names, Hardy set scenes from his great novels, drawing on his boyhood memories of the brooding landscape around his home and on walking tours of his later life. The group will make an excursion to the Victorian resort Isle of Wight, where participants will visit Farringford, Tennyson’s former mansion, now a handsome hotel with splendid views of the sea. The tour will conclude with a few days in London, where there will be time for theater, several walking tours focused on the haunts of Romantic and Victorian authos, and a visit to Highgate Cemetery, the Victorian Vallhala.