BooksPlease

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Books With Nationalities In The Title (e.g. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Mexican Gothic, An American Mariage, etc.) (submitted by Cathy @WhatCathyReadNext)

This was harder than I thought it would be! I’ve read all of them but some of them are books I read before I had this blog.

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

The Italian Girl – Iris Murdoch

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier

English Pastoral by James Rebanks

God Is an Englishman by R F Delderfield

The English: a Portrait of a People by Jeremy Paxman

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

The Dutch House by Anne Patchett

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Bookish Places I’ve Visited (Share all the cool places you’ve been that are bookish or tied to books! This includes neat libraries, book stores, places featured in books, places inspired by books, author homes/places they’ve stayed, etc. You can also share your bucket list of the bookish places you’d like to visit someday.) (submitted by Susan @Bloggin’ ’bout Books)

Jane Austen

Several years ago I visited Winchester where Jane Austen spent the last six weeks of her life. She died on 18 July 18i7 at the age of 41 with her sister Cassandra by her side.

She was buried in the north aisle of the nave in Winchester Cathedral. A dark marble floor stone marks her actual burial site.

Agatha Christie lived in several houses during her lifetime, including Winterbrook House, near Wallingford, in Oxfordshire. She and her husband Max Mallowan bought the house in 1934 and it was where she died in 1976. It’s not open to the public but you can view it from the road, which I did in September 2009. I wrote about my visit in this post. You can read more about Wallingford and her life there on the Agatha Christie website.

Smailholm Tower is a four-storey tower house on a base of volcanic rock, a stark feature on the skyline between Kelso and Selkirk in the Tweed Valley. Sir Walter Scott’s grandparents lived here and he lived at Smailholm for a while with his grandmother and Aunt Janet after he’d had polio because they thought the fresh country air would be good for him. It was his aunt who told him tales of the Border countryside which gave him his passion for folklore and history. This isn’t far from me and we’ve visited it several times.

Bateman’s, near Burwash in East Sussex was the home of Rudyard Kipling from 1902 until his death in 1936. The photo above is the front cover of the National Trust guide book showing Kipling’s study, which according to the guide book was not how he left it. He was a messy writer. He wrote on large blue pads and he and the desk would be covered in ink. At times his desk was chaotic.

Lamb House (now a National Trust property) in the medieval town of Rye – Henry James lived here from 1898 until the autumn of 1914, when he moved to Cheyne Walk in London and deeply moved by the events of the war he became a British citizen. Rye House dates back to 1722-3 when the old house was rebuilt. It was here that James wrote The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. He had many visitors, established writers of the day including Edith Wharton. It has a lovely walled garden and it was in full bloom when we visited it.

E F Benson also lived here from 1919 – 1940. He used the house as the model for ‘Mallards,’ the home of Miss Mapp in his Mapp and Lucia novels (with Rye itself disguised as ‘Tilling’).

Rumer Godden, also lived here from 1967 to 1974. She wrote many volumes of poems, short stories and children’s fiction including The Diddakoi in 1972, which was awarded the first ever Whitbread Children’s Book Award. Godden lived at Lamb House from 1967 until 1974 and is buried in Rye.

Nottingham – D H Lawrence – We visited D H Lawrence’s birthplace at Eastwood, 8 miles from Nottingham. 8A Victoria Street is the house where Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 and I think it is a fascinating place. The house was newly built when the Lawrence family moved there in 1883, one of several rows of houses built for the miners by the local colliery company, Barber Walker and Co. It’s a redbrick two-up, two-down standing in a row of terraced houses. The adjoining end terrace house is now a museum and shop.

Rosslyn Chapel I first came across Rosslyn Chapel through reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and was fascinated by it then. We’ve visited it twice, first on a cold windy day in March, which is probably the best time to go because on our second visit a few years later it was packed with visitors. It’s simply the most stunning building, packed with stone carvings. I was interested in all the mystery surrounding the carvings and their meanings and whether there really was a link with the Knights Templar. The guide book indicates that there were in fact connections – the carvings of the five-pointed star, the dove in flight carrying an olive branch, the floriated cross and the artichoke are all said to have Templar associations. But what struck me the most were the Mason’s Pillar, the Apprentice Pillar and the carvings of maize over one of the windows.

The Writers’ Museum, Lady Stairs House a 17th century house in Edinburgh, which I visited in 2010. This is a fascinating place full of things that belonged to Sir Walter Scott, Robbie Burns and Robert Lewis Stevenson. There are pictures, room displays containing Burns’s writing desk, Scott’s dining table and lots of memorabilia – including bibles, pipes and walking sticks.

I’ve been to Stratford- Upon-Avon many times, going to see plays at The Royal Shakespeare Company and spent visiting some of the houses where William Shakespeare lived, including his Birthplace, Nash’s House,originally owned by his granddaughter’s first husband and adjacent to it is New Place, which Shakespeare bought in 1597 and where he died in 1616. We also visited Hall’s Croft, which belonged to his daughter Susannah and her husband John Hall, an eminent doctor.