Misplaced: why do novelists disguise real locations?

Whether to spare local feelings, to emphasise that their stories are fiction, or to license fanciful embroidering, writers love to hide the actual settings of their work

‘Christminster’ ... Thomas Hardy’s setting for Jude the Obscure, strangely reminiscent of Oxford. Photograph: travelbild.com/Alamy

Stuart Kelly

Tuesday 26 May 2015 The Guardian

This may sound like a peculiar question, but why do novelists make things up? In particular, why do they invent places? I can understand why they would create imaginary places for fantastical fictions – it would be rather odd to have the Starks of Stirling and the Martells of St Ives in Game Of Thrones – but why does Thomas Hardy send Jude to Christminster when it’s clearly Oxford? Why did George Eliot set her study of provincial life in Middlemarch, North Loamshire, rather than Coventry? What prevented Charles Dickens writing about Preston rather than Coketown? From Barsetshire to Yoknapatawpha County, St Mary Mead to Chester’s Mill, authors have been nudging, shifting, switching and smudging real places into fiction.
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