The Land of My Fathers...

'O the flummery of a birth place!' wrote John Keats, but there is an endless fascination to places that are closely linked to famous people and their work. The new edition of the Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland invites the reader to explore the places where their favourite writers were born, lived, and drew inspiration.

Some places such as Haworth, the home of the Bronte sisters, are so closely associated with an author that the mere name brings them to mind. Charlotte's description of Emily's Wuthering Heights sums up: 'It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath'. Other places have inspired writers in other ways. W. H. Auden wrote of Yeats 'Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry'.

London, of course, features in the lives of many writers. It was Samuel Johnson who said 'When a man is tired of London he is tired of life', while Charles Dickens was said to 'describe London like a special correspondent for posterity'. Wordsworth looked at the view from Westminster Bridge and said 'Earth has not anything to show more fair', but he is more closely associated in many people's minds with daffodils 'fluttering and dancing in the breeze' in the Lake District.

Some authors create a world for us. Jane Austen's Regency Bath can be summed up in the opening words from Pride and Prejudice 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife'. Others just find an evocative phrase. Matthew Arnold's description 'And that sweet City with her dreaming spires' has become so closely linked with Oxford that today it might almost be an advertising slogan.

Sir Walter Scott wrote romantically of his home, 'O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child!', while on occasion the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas took a less respectful line: 'The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it'. But he immortalized Laugharne as the 'small town, starless and bible-black' of Under Milk Wood.

The ultimate literary pilgrimage is perhaps to Stratford-upon-Avon, the home of Shakespeare who gave to 'airy nothing A local habitation and a name', and contributed more quotations to the English language than any other single writer.

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