Literary Locations

The literary lure of the sea…

St Ives

Fiction writers have several decisions to make when choosing the locations for their narratives. For example, should the story be set overtly in a real, named location or should a new place and setting be created – often based on somewhere the writer knows and loves?

Famously, Joyce, while writing Ulysses over several years in self imposed exile, chose the former route, which required him to write occasionally to his friends back in Dublin requesting precise details about the layout of the streets and the buildings to convey the verisimilitude he required for his modernist masterpiece.

For her own modernist masterpiece, Virginia Woolf chose the latter route. She wanted To The Lighthouse to be an elegy, commemorating the many childhood months she spent in St Ives with her family, which in later life she observed was a rapture she could not describe. But in choosing to transpose her memories of St Ives to the Isle of Skye, the verisimilitude of her novel was challenged. She received criticism from several quarters that details in the novel were simply not possible, such as the plants that may well have grown in Cornwall, but were unlikely to be seen in Scotland’s more northerly climate.

But does such pedantry matter when the hypnotic effects of Godrevy lighthouse loom so symbolically over the story and the sounds of the sea beat in time with the pulse of the novel’s beautifully lyrical rhythms?… ‘for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue.’

Along with many artists inspired by the unique light in and around St Ives, several other writers have associations with this spectacular literary location including George Meredith, Henry James, DH Lawrence, Compton MacKenzie and Katherine Mansfield.

Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis in Dorset is renowned not only for its geological fossils, but also for its literary fossils, which are many and various.

Famously, Jane Austen visited Lyme Regis in 1804 and the place must have made a lasting impression because it was many years before she so convincingly set part of Persuasion in the town. In one of the novel’s most memorable scenes, Louisa Musgrove falls down on the Lower Cobb and is ‘taken up lifeless’ – a scene that was clearly revered by Tennyson, because immediately on arrival in the town years later, he demanded to be taken to the exact spot where Louisa was supposed to have fallen.

Many other literary figures have been connected with the town including Henry Fielding, Beatrix Potter, Oscar Wilde, G.K. Chesterton, P.G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett, J. R. R. Tolkien, Sir John Betjeman and Colin Dexter.

A case can be made that John Fowles is the writer that deserves the limelight (apologies!) in this literary location, not only because he actually lived in the town for many years, but also because his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman is largely set in and around this part of Dorset.

Although the book, with its three different endings, is most recognised as a postmodern tour de force, it deserves as much credit for its evocative sense of place. The Cobb is described as primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass. With equal sense of locale, Lyme’s Undercliff is described as very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented by strange bluffs and towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the lush foliage around them like the walls of ruined castles.

A literary location indeed!