where some famous authors lived

Monk's House in Sussex, England, was a refuge to Virginia Woolf who did so much of her writing there: "emotion recollected in tranquility," to paraphrase Wordsworth. It was therefore all the more shocking that it was from this house that she walked to the River Ouse to drown. A feminist forerunner, she said in her essay A Room of One's Own, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

William Butler Yeats lived his middle years in Thoor Ballylee near Galway, one of those square stone towers one sees all over Ireland. It was here that he and his wife Georgie developed automatic writing for inspiration. It was also here that he wrote The Wild Swans at Coole, The Tower and The Winding Stair. A few of my favorite lines from The Song of Wandering Aengus:
"And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun."


Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, had to leave her intoxicating life in Africa at its apogee to return to Denmark. Like Woolf, she also spent her remaining years writing "emotion recollected in tranquility," notably Out of Africa and Babette's Feast. Raymond Carver quoted her as saying in Writers at Work, "I write a little every day, without hope and without despair."

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was one of a dying breed of Italian aristocracy: he was a prince under King Victor Emmanuel III living in a magnificent palace and was deeply embittered when this world collapsed with World War II and the bombing of his home. He re-created something of his old lifestyle with the purchase of a palace in the Via Butera in Palermo, Sicily. He described the old world in The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) which was made into a movie.



Jean Cocteau lived the last years of his life here in Milly-la-Foret near Fontainebleau in France. A pastiche of photos of friends--Jean Marais, Coco Chanel, Picasso, Edith Piaf--and collectibles line this wall draped in leopard print. A suurealist and forerunner of the New Wave movement, Cocteau wrote the novel Les Enfants terribles and the original screenplays for Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. He also wrote for Diaghilev and the Ballets russes.

Photos by Erica Lennard