Literary Travel
Down the Shore, to Asbury Park
A recent book event at the Asbury Book Cooperative led me to an excursion the Jersey shore.
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Thomas Hardy’s Literary Dorset
Thomas Hardy’s atmospheric Tess of the D’Obervilles, set in Dorchester near Dorset, made a big impression on me when I read it at a young age, for its depiction of the hard life of agricultural laborers and the restricted possibilities for women. Hardy’s home is now a museum. The modest house and grounds stand in stark contrast…
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A Sense of Place: Virginia Woolf’s “Hauntings”
Virginia Woolf regularly went on what she called “street hauntings,” where she wandered around London. She wanted to feel absorbed in her surroundings, and in particular to watch people’s interactions with the city. She described this as leading to a “dissolution of the self,” a sense that the boundaries between herself and her environment were…
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Jane Austen’s Bath, England
The formal and elegant city of Bath is an exquisite example of a planned city. If “city” and “jumbled” go together for you, a city as harmonious as Bath will take a bit of getting used to. Built along the Avon river and its gentle slopes, white and cream buildings form grand avenues and crescents beyond the town…
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Historic Lamb House, Home of Henry James, in Rye, East Sussex
Many artists and writers find inspiration in landscape or in the built environments of cities and towns. What attracts a writer to a given location? A drawing of a house is what drew author Henry James (1843-1916), an American who lived in Britain, to the the historic seaport town of Rye, in East Sussex, England. Enchanted…
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Community Sharing: “Barn Quilts” and Little Free Libraries
This summer my husband, Mark, and I spent a few weeks in the Adirondacks and southern Quebec. We took a ferry across Lake Champlain from Essex, NY, to Burlington, VT, then drove north across the border into Canada and along the Richelieu River, stopping at small towns along the way. This kind of aimless wandering,…
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