Literary Trails of the South Coast

Summary

It is a truth universally acknowledged that many of the giants of English literature, including the author of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ herself, have associations and connections with the south of England. We have therefore strung together a sequence of visits that unites some of our best loved and most celebrated authors in this corner of the country.

The South Coast tour begins at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, regarded as the most treasured Austen site in the world, and nearby Chawton House, the ‘great house’ referred to in Jane’s letters. The next day we call at Gilbert White’s house in Selborne, where this pioneering ‘parson naturalist’ wrote his celebrated ‘Natural History and Antiquities’. We also visit the Charles Dickens’ Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth and Jane Austen’s grave and memorials in Winchester Cathedral and take a brief walk in the footsteps of that old romantic John Keats. Our tour concludes with a prowl around Virginia Woolf’s former residence Monk’s House and a visit to Rudyard Kipling’s old den at Bateman’s, a Jacobean house with an elegant garden.

Note: this tour has been timed so that it can be taken immediately after our Literary Trails of the West Country tour, with a night in London in between. The South West tour also features Jane Austen - please see separate itinerary for details.

Tour highlights:

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• Two houses associated with Jane Austen, plus her grave and memorial in Winchester Cathedral
• The very garden in which Gilbert White made some of his charming wildlife observations
• The birthplace of one of the true giants of English popular literature
• An insight into the lives and loves of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’
• A quintessential English garden