Literary tourism has been a lucrative business since the Victorians--especially in the United Kingdom. But why do readers come in droves to authors' birthplaces and homes? What magical experience do we expect when visiting the places they walked (and sometimes--though not always--wrote)? Simon Goldhill (Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives) tackles these questions by traveling to five famous authors' houses-turned-museums, exploring--and satirizing--the myth of literary pilgrimage with equal parts scholarship and skepticism.
Goldhill's journey takes him down the length of Britain--from Sir Walter Scott's Edinburgh mansion, built by the author to promote his public image, to Freud's office in London, an unsettlingly meticulous re-creation of its counterpart in Vienna. Along the way, he visits Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, the Brontë parsonage and Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon, musing on the idea of place as inspiration, the contrast between a writer's private life and constructed public persona, and the connection between literary and spiritual pilgrimages--the shared impulse to follow in the literal footsteps of one's heroes. Though unmoved by the sterile, velvet-roped atmosphere of the Brontë home, and annoyed by gift shops stuffed with overpriced tchotchkes, Goldhill does have a few epiphanies by journey's end--including the realization that he's actually enjoying his pilgrimage.
Part travel memoir, part literary inquiry, with a large dose of history and frequent dashes of dry humor, this book will appeal to bookworms, Anglophiles and anyone who loves to visit historical sites but rolls their eyes at the overpriced rubbish in the gift shop. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams