Temples of literature: writers' houses – in pictures

From the abbey where Byron partied to the house where Agatha Christie tested out her whodunnits, Nick Channer tells the inside story of the homes behind some of the great works of English literature

Nick Channer

Monday 4 May 2015 The Guardian

• 
  
• 
  

• George Eliot: Arbury Hall, Warwickshire
  Born Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot grew up close to Arbury Hall, where her father was employed as land agent. It provided her with a rich seam of material which she exploited in three Warwickshire stories, Scenes of Clerical Life. Later novels also drew on life at Arbury. Eliot was intrigued by the history of the house and its Gothic remodelling, which took more than 50 years to complete. As a child, she would accompany her father to the hall, where she had free run of the rooms and browsed in the library.

  

• • Dylan Thomas: The Boat House, Carmarthenshire
    Thomas moved to the Boat House at Laugharne, 40 miles west of Swansea, in 1949. It was the house of which the poet and his wife always dreamed. The view from his writing shed – a ‘water and tree room on the cliff’ – inspired many of his poems. Here he would observe the eternal cycle of the tide and the variable, often dramatic, weather conditions of the estuary. Visitors find the cluttered study strewn with books, cigarette packets and discarded notes, just as it was when Thomas was working.

  • More