Author Description

When the Oxford Literary Guide first appeared, it was hailed by The Times of London as "the finest reference work of its kind," while a TLS reviewer reported that he had road-tested the book on a journey from London to Herefordshire. This trip normally takes under four hours. His literary pilgrimage took four days.Now in a new edition, with over 100 places added, as well as 137 more authors, this beautifully illustrated, over-sized volume lists hundreds of places in Britain and Ireland and details their connections with the lives of famous writers. This popular guide provides over 300 illustrations of writers, their houses, and the landscapes that inspired them, as well as a wealth of curious information and entertaining anecdotes. Take a tour of Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey, where you can find Chaucer's canopied tomb, a monument to Shakespeare with lines from The Tempest, the grave of Dickens, and tablets to Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, among many others. Read how the Cumbrian Lake District's breathtaking scenery inspired the "Lake Poets" Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and how Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" was written after he saw the Athenian sculptures at the British Museum. Walk through Chelsea to see where of A.A. Milne, Mark Twain, and Bram Stoker lived. Or travel off the beaten path, to Liverpool, for instance, where bankruptcy led Washington Irving to write the great American classic Rip Van Winkle, or to Muckross, where the author of Baron Munchausen, himself a spinner of tall tales, conned a landowner into buying property planted with samples of rich ore, or to Near Sawrey, where Beatrix Potter owned a seventeenth-century farmhouse.Arranged for easy reference, with maps and an index of writers, The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland will help readers experience the richness of this great literary heritage.