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Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Thursday, August 4th, 2011
Readymoney cottage near Fowey, Cornwall, was 1940s home of the author of Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek
The house boasts four bedrooms, lovely views across a Cornish cove and a garden with a tennis court. And if that is not tempting enough it has a rich literary history thrown in for free.
Daphne du Maurier, the author of Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek, one imagines, once sat at an upstairs window of Readymoney cottage in Fowey and sought inspiration as she gazed across the water. She rented the house in the early 1940s and it remains one of the sites of pilgrimage for the many fans who arrive in Cornwall from across the world looking for traces of the writer.
Now being sold for the best part of £2m, estate agent Savills describes the cottage as an “exceptionally appealing detached coastal residence” in “one of the most desirable parts of Fowey”. Du Maurier’s cast iron bath, the agency points out, is now a feature in the garden.
The cottage was originally built as a coach house and stables for the nearby waterfront Italianate mansion, Point Neptune.
By the time she arrived at Readymoney in 1942 with her three children, du Maurier had already written Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek. But according to her biographer Margaret Forster, she arrived under something of a cloud.
She had been staying with friends in a grand house in Hertfordshire while her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, was away busy setting up Britain’s first airborne division. Unfortunately, according to Forster, Du Maurier, was caught in an embrace with her hostess’s husband. Du Maurier, then 34, wrote to a friend that “after many probings and thinkings” she was moving to Cornwall, where her mother and sisters were living and which had inspired her famous works, to “sort myself out”.
She dreamed of finding a “little hut on a little island” but settled on moving to Readymoney in Fowey in April 1942.
The family was more cramped than they had been in Hertfordshire but were pleased that the cottage was so close to the beach. Du Maurier began work on a new book, Hungry Hill. Forster says the book, a family saga, was a reaction to Frenchman’s Creek, which she had dismissed as frivolous.
She based Hungry Hill loosely — or perhaps not so loosely — on stories she had been told by the man she had been caught in that embrace with – Christopher Puxley.
Forster reports that Puxley used to visit Fowey and stay in a hotel down the road from Readymoney. The pair would meet for picnics and spend time together in an old coastguard’s hut on the cliffs.
In 1943 her husband was hurt in a glider crash in Wiltshire and Du Maurier brought him to Readymoney to nurse him. But after he rejoined his colleagues in north Africa, she is said to have grown tired of life in the cottage.
Her book came out in May 1943 and was disliked by the critics. At the end of September the lease on Readymoney ran out and she set up home at nearby Menabilly, a grander house she had known for years and which is reputedly one of the inspirations for Manderley, the atmospheric but doom-laden house and estate in Rebecca.
The current owners of Readymoney cottage have refurbished it and added a plaque celebrating Du Maurier’s stay. On a number of occasions they have held open days of its gardens, which feature a brook criss-crossed by bridges, so that Du Maurier enthusiasts could soak up the atmosphere.
Justine Hambly-Wooldridge, of the Daphne du Maurier literary centre in Fowey, said the cottage would always be closely associated with the author.
“A lot of people still visit,” she said. “Many people try and go to Menabilly – the mansion she lived in after Readymoney – but it’s very inaccessible and closed to the public.
“There’s still a great deal of interest in her and her homes and the area. We get people from all over Britain and the rest of the world – Americans and Germans especially.
“Many come for the annual festival but others just come to see the places where she lived.”
The Du Maurier house is the latest in a string of homes with literary associations that have come on the market recently. A former holiday home of Charles Dickens, Bleak House in Broadstairs, Kent, was put up for sale earlier this year, as was JG Ballard’s semi in Shepperton, Surrey.
JK Rowling’s former home near Chepstow sold within weeks of being put on the market.
Posted in Books, Daphne Du Maurier, Features, House News, Literary trips, Money, News, Property, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Closed
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
JG Ballard, Charles Dickens and JK Rowling have all inhabited properties that were up for grabs – for the right price
• For a house completely intertwined with the life and work of a writer, few can match the 1930s semi in Shepperton, Surrey, where JG Ballard spent 49 years raising his children and writing futuristic, dystopian novels, some of which took their suburban setting from the author’s sleepy base south-west of London.
After Ballard’s death in 2009 it went on sale this month for £320,000, despite protest by fans that the three-bedroom home, which is in a somewhat dilapidated state, should instead become a museum. It has now been withdrawn from sale to be rented out, with a new family due to move in this month.
• While one of Charles Dickens’ London homes is now a museum dedicated to the writer, you can get your hands on the clifftop home in Broadstairs, Kent where he and his family holidayed for 22 years – if you have £2m to spare. Dickens wrote David Copperfield while staying in the now Grade II-listed turreted mansion and the views supposedly inspired Bleak House, after which the home was named following Dicken’s death. If that’s not enough, according to the estate agents it was also visited by another Victorian literary giant, Wilkie Collins.
• If JK Rowling is your obsession then you’ve just missed out. Church Cottage, the mid-19th century Gothic home near Chepstow, Gwent, where the author grew up, has gone under offer only weeks after being put up for sale for £400,000.
Apart from more traditional attractions such as a well-tended garden and wooden floors, temptations included an inscription on a bedroom windowframe reading “Joanne Rowling slept here circa 1982″ and a cupboard under the stairs, perhaps the inspiration for Harry Potter’s bedroom. There’s even a trapdoor in the living room.
Posted in Books, Culture, House News, Money, News, Property, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Closed
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
Her fictional version of Cornwall was a dark, secretive place of passion and romance
The Cornish house that is now on the market has only a small connection with the writer, but the Du Maurier spell is potent enough to bewitch it. Few writers are so intimately linked to a place that became theirs through adoption as Daphne is, through novels like Rebecca, Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek, to Cornwall. No surprise that there is a successful annual festival in her honour each May in Fowey. Yet Du Maurier was 20 when she first saw Menabilly, the probable model for Manderley, which is as significant as the characters of Danvers or Rebecca herself, and it was another 15 years before she could afford to live there. By then she had already created her Cornwall in fiction: a dark, secretive place of passion and romance curiously at odds with Du Maurier’s own wide-eyed beauty and gung-ho attitude to outdoor exercise. Despite the jarring intensity of The Birds in 1952 and Don’t Look Now (1970), it was only much later that the dark, secretive side of Du Maurier’s own character became an accepted influence on her work. The middlebrow writer is now more highly rated as a psychological realist, a woman grappling with her own complex relationship with her brilliant father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, whose languid stage presence and pressing need for cash inspired the eponymous cigarette. Hard to imagine a more agreeable companion for a lazy afternoon on a Cornish beach than the irresistible mix of surface charm and secret passion of a Du Maurier.
Posted in Books, Comment is free, Daphne Du Maurier, Editorials, House News, Money, Property, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Closed
Sunday, July 17th, 2011
JG Ballard’s house is on the market – and it has been suggested that fans club together to turn it into a museum
With all the fuss over the prospective sale of JK Rowling’s childhood home (Look – a cupboard under the stairs! It must have inspired Harry Potter!), not enough attention is being paid to what seems to me a far more important literary property story.
JG Ballard‘s house in Shepperton, London, is up for sale. This is where the writer lived and wrote from 1960 until his death in 2009. You don’t need to blether about cupboards under stairs to make the case for its importance. Shepperton held a vital place in Ballard’s imagination: he was drawn to its commercial nullity, its suburban Englishness crossed by shabby concrete carriageways, its proximity to those in-between places, such as airports and orbital roads, in which he thrived.
It was around Shepperton that the protagonist of Crash, his novel about people being sexually aroused by car crashes, drove. In another novel, he wrote: “The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere.”
It’s strange that this strangest of writers should have been so devoted to so ordinary a patch of ground. But it’s also a clue to how his life shaped his gift. The amazing thing about Miracles of Life, his 2008 autobiography, was that what seemed to be outlandish dream images in his early work – empty swimming pools and abandoned airstrips, the juxtaposition of good manners with outright psychosis, the strange conjunctions of the brutal and the decorative – were actually the fruit of his wartime childhood in China.
When he came to Shepperton, Ballard was fascinated by the apparent perversity of civilisation pretending to be civilised. Here was his subject. Ballard went to where the weird was and stayed there. But what he saw as weird, we see as normal.
The subtitle of his autobiography characterises the arc of his life as being “from Shanghai to Shepperton”. He liked to play himself. A friend of mine, who interviewed him a few years back, found herself inside his house “staring warily at a length of yellowing net curtain in the window of the most dilapidated house in the row. The garden is overgrown and weeds threaten to bind the tyres of a silver Ford Granada to the driveway. ‘I’ll be looking out for you at 2.30, peering through my curtains,’ Ballard had said earlier that day.”
Simon Sellars, who runs the Ballardian website, has suggested fans club together to turn the house into a museum. The asking price is £320,000, and the house is described as “in need of refurbishment”. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to ensure that this “refurbishment” never takes place? When I looked at the estate agent’s website, I could find no mention of the house’s literary connection – but there was a button you could click for a slideshow. I imagined it would nip briskly through some bright photographs of the different rooms inside the house. But it was actually more like an installation-art tribute to the great man.
A pop-up window appears. There’s a photograph of the front of the house, a red-brick semi with a shabby yellow door and uneven nets in the curved window. It hangs there for a few seconds, then vanishes, to be replaced by a photograph of a completely overgrown garden. The image zooms towards the foliage. Then the original image reappears and we zoom in again. Then we have the front of the house again, zooming in. House, garden, house, house, house, garden. It’s mechanical, random, impersonal, and rather sinister. What’s lurking in that foliage? What’s this anxious zoom trying to show us behind the net curtains?
It is brilliantly Ballardian. His editor once told me that Ballard saw his role, as a writer, to be the man standing on the hard shoulder of a particularly hairy curve on the motorway of modernity, holding up a bent cardboard sign on which were scrawled words to the effect of “TROUBLE AHEAD!” or “BRIDGE OUT!” If we can’t buy the house, we could at least have a whipround for a statue of the man holding just such a placard. He could be hanging over the side of Laleham Road, just where it passes over the M3.
Posted in Books, Comment, Culture, Fiction, House News, JG Ballard, Literary fiction, Property, Science fiction, The Guardian | Comments Closed
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
The house in Tutshill contains features that may have inspired the Harry Potter books, such as a cupboard under the stairs
Harry Potter fans have read the books, seen the films and could now – if they have the funds and inclination – even own the childhood home that may well have inspired JK Rowling to create the magical world of Hogwarts.
Church Cottage in Tutshill, near Chepstow, a former schoolhouse built in the gothic style in the mid-19th century, is on the market for around £400,000.
Its attractive features would appeal to many buyers, and include a pretty garden, flagstone and stripped wood floors and what the estate agent calls “part estuary views” from a bedroom.
But Potter enthusiasts will be more taken by a message scrawled in “bedroom 3″: “a small inscription on the window frame reading: ‘Joanne Rowling slept here circa 1982′.”
As well as the gothic style, beams and vaulted ceilings, another feature that might have stuck in Rowling’s mind as she sat down to write Harry Potter is a boy-wizard-sized cupboard under the stairs. Potter, of course, was forced to live in such a cupboard by his unpleasant aunt and uncle. The house also has a trapdoor leading to a cellar not dissimilar to the one guarded by the fearsome three-headed dog in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The name of the village will also resonate with those who know their Harry Potter as Rowling uses it for Tutshill Tornadoes, one of the teams that plays Quidditch.
The current owner of Church Cottage, Julian Mercer, a BBC producer, bought the cottage from the Rowling family in 1995.
He said: “It is a lovely cottage. It is quite small but has wonderful architecture and a gorgeous garden surrounding it.
“JK Rowling would have been here in her formative years and could have taken inspiration from the cottage. The architecture is very Hogwarts-like. It has vaulted ceilings, stone windows and oozes gothic spirit.”
“When we first moved in JK Rowling was not a known name and it was a couple of years later that the Philosopher’s Stone came out.
“It was then that we knew the significance of the name written on the windowsill. We have redecorated the house completely since moving in but we always painted around it.”
After attending nearby Wyedean comprehensive, Rowling left the Chepstow area to attend Exeter University. She moved to London and began to write the Harry Potter series during a delayed train journey between Manchester and King’s Cross station in London. The first book was completed while she lived in Edinburgh.
Church Cottage, built by the gothic revivalist architect Henry Woodyer in about 1852, is being sold by estate agent Properts in Chepstow.
Posted in Books, Film, Harry Potter, House News, JK Rowling, News, Property, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Closed
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In praise of… the Du Maurier spell
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011Her fictional version of Cornwall was a dark, secretive place of passion and romance
The Cornish house that is now on the market has only a small connection with the writer, but the Du Maurier spell is potent enough to bewitch it. Few writers are so intimately linked to a place that became theirs through adoption as Daphne is, through novels like Rebecca, Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek, to Cornwall. No surprise that there is a successful annual festival in her honour each May in Fowey. Yet Du Maurier was 20 when she first saw Menabilly, the probable model for Manderley, which is as significant as the characters of Danvers or Rebecca herself, and it was another 15 years before she could afford to live there. By then she had already created her Cornwall in fiction: a dark, secretive place of passion and romance curiously at odds with Du Maurier’s own wide-eyed beauty and gung-ho attitude to outdoor exercise. Despite the jarring intensity of The Birds in 1952 and Don’t Look Now (1970), it was only much later that the dark, secretive side of Du Maurier’s own character became an accepted influence on her work. The middlebrow writer is now more highly rated as a psychological realist, a woman grappling with her own complex relationship with her brilliant father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, whose languid stage presence and pressing need for cash inspired the eponymous cigarette. Hard to imagine a more agreeable companion for a lazy afternoon on a Cornish beach than the irresistible mix of surface charm and secret passion of a Du Maurier.
Posted in Books, Comment is free, Daphne Du Maurier, Editorials, House News, Money, Property, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Closed