#33 A literary tour of the Cotswolds

On seven leading authors who made the Cotswolds even greater than it is.

Nov 19, 2021

When I first moved to the UK, a little over five years ago, I promised myself I’d visit the country so I can get a chance and immerse myself in the local culture, beyond the London buzz and popular touristic attractions. Whilst I did travel in major towns and cities across England and Wales, the countryside has been an untapped territory for me, mainly due to conventional barriers such as not having a car or being able to drive. It was this week I made my way to the Cotswolds, a region of charming scenery, rolling hills, green pastures, and idyllic villages.

The Cotswolds is also the place that has brought to life some of the best-loved stories over the centuries. Many notable writers and poets have found inspiration in the honey-coloured stone villages, and yes, it did feel like a privilege to wander around and follow in the footsteps of some literary giants.

Below are some compelling anecdotes from seven authors that hopefully will convince you to add the Cotswolds as part of your travel destination:

Jane Austen: Although largely connected to the city of Bath where she lived for several years and set two of her novels, “Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey,” Austen is also thought to have drawn inspiration from the Cotswolds village of Adlestrop, one of her cousins’ ancestral homes. Fictional places in the novel “Mansfield Park” might have emerged from Adlestrop Park and the Parsonage House.
Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – his real name): Carroll used to spend time around Stow-on-the-Wold with his friend, Reverend Edward Litton, a Cotswold clergyman. Litton’s daughter is believed to be the inspiration for Alice from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and the sequel “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.”
J. M. Barrie, the author of the wildly acclaimed children’s book “Peter Pan,” conceived his iconic character while staying in the Cotswolds, as a regular guest at Stanway House in the village of Stanway, near Broadway. This is where he put together his own amateur cricket team, The Allahakbarries (Barrie mistakenly believed that “Allah akbar” meant “Heaven help us” as opposed to its true meaning “God is great”). His literary friends Arthur Conan Doyle, A. A. Milne, and P.G. Wodehouse joined him. Rumour has it Barrie repeatedly tried to lure H.G. Wells to come and play at Broadway, but Wells – clearly not a cricket fan – refused.
Graham Greene: For Greene, it was the Cotswolds and the town of Chipping Campden that led him to his flourishing writing career. This is where he wrote his first successful novel, “Stamboul Train”, which later was turned into the “Orient Express” film. In 2017, Stratford Herald announced that the cottage where Greene used to live, Little Orchard, was on the market for £525,000.
T.S. Eliot: One of the most prominent English-language poets of the 20th century and Nobel laureate, Eliot also felt at home in the Cotswolds town of Chipping Campden visiting his friend, Emily Hale. References to his long strolls with Emily are described in the poem “The Country Walk.” Additionally, “Burnt Norton,” the first poem of “Four Quartets,” is said to have occurred after seeing the neglected gardens of Norton House, a 17th-century house that was abandoned by its owner,
George Orwell (or Eric Blair, if we were to address him after his real name): Orwell completed his classic dystopian novel, 1984, while receiving treatment at the Cotswold Sanatorium for Consumption in Cranham in 1949.
J.R.R. Tolkien: “The Lord of the Rings” author visited the Cotswolds a lot during his lifetime because of his aunt who had a cottage there. The medieval church in Stow-on-the-Wold, the Four Shire Stone, and Broadway Tower are among the places that have proved to be a source of inspiration for his work.

I guess it’s true what they say: Once you visit the Cotswolds, you’ll never want to leave. Also, it gets even better: there are plenty of dogs! (And everyone is happy for you to pet them!) London, is this goodbye?

Forget moving to France to start your writing career from a Parisian café overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Try the Cotswolds. Cheaper, quieter, better.

P.S: That’s me in front of someone’s house in Lower Slaughter (that specifically had a sign displayed with “no pics allowed”). #sorrynotsorry

🪱 Every week, The Culture Worm gets braver and delivers more nuanced and compelling content. Be part of this journey and join hundreds of subscribers in getting your weekly food for thought:

📣 Coming up:

News on Wilbur Smith, Olga Tokarczuk, Donna Tartt, and more. Plus, wet gigs, painting your pet’s fur, and the 2021 word of the year.

Until next Friday …

Happy reading, happy learning,

Teodora x

🥁 📚 The latest in the literary world

Patrick Radden Keefe has won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his revelatory study of the Sackler Dynasty, “Empire of Pain”! 👏 🏆 Keefe looked at how the Sackler family, known for the philanthropic donations to art institutions, has its wealth rooted in corruption and is connected to the devastating opioid crisis that swept the United States. Chair of judges and literary editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Holgate, has called Keefe’s book “journalism as outstanding literature, [and what we have here is] a future classic.” 🎉
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is being investigated – yet again! – for insulting the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and ridiculing the Turkish flag in his new novel “Nights of Plague”. If found guilty, Pamuk could face up to three years in prison. 🙈 This is not an isolated case for the Turkish novelist: In 2005, similar allegations of “insulting Turkishness” were made because Pamuk brought up the Armenian genocide in an interview. (More than a century has passed and Turkey still doesn’t recognise the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire 🙊)
A French reference dictionary is under fire for having a gender-inclusive pronoun. 🔥 The use of “iel” (a combination of the French words for he and she – “il” and “elle”) has been condemned by the education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, for being the equivalent of the US-inspired “woke”. Inclusive writing is not on the agenda anytime soon, and students, “who are consolidating their basic knowledge, cannot have that as a reference.” 😬
The entire literary world is mourning the death of the bestselling South African novelist Wilbur Smith, who passed away last Saturday, aged 88. 🪦 Smith had a prolific writing career with 49 novels that sold more than 140 million copies in 30 languages; he left a lasting legacy of adventure fiction, including “When the Lion Feeds” (regarded as one of his finest works), and the Ancient Egyptian series. 👏
The Nobel Prize–winner Olga Tokarczuk’s richest and most ambitious novel, “The Books of Jacob,” has finally hit the UK bookstores this week, after an English translation that was seven years in the making! The masterpiece is a mammoth-sized read, running to more than 1,000 pages, and tells the story of Jacob Frank, a Jewish religious leader who claimed to be the messiah and founded his own quasi-Jewish quasi-Christian Frankist sect in the 18th century. A perfect winter holiday read, eh? 😅 😶

🎧 📰 👀 My media diet this week

Donna Tartt in her own words for the Italian magazine Rivista Studio. Why read this? A very good friend of mine is obsessed with Tartt’s writing, and for good reason: This woman is good with words. So good that is worth waiting a decade for a new novel to be published. (Yes, she’s only written three novels so far – all excellent, or so I’ve heard!) You’ll discover Tartt’s music preferences 🎶, fellow contemporary authors’ books she admires 📚, and her love for fashion. 👜BONUS: This quote made me smile and reminded me why I started The Culture Worm in the first place: “A book is a dream that writer and reader dream together. The writer provides the scaffolding and holds the reader’s hand to lead them in – while the reader provides the daydreams and memories and wishes that fill out the structure, so that the book takes on somewhat the shape of the reader’s mind.” 🥺
This feature interview of the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei via Penguin.co.uk. Why read this? You’ll learn about his memoir, “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows,” his battles with the Chinese authorities, and his three-month detention in an anonymous government building scrutinised from dusk till dawn, with eight minutes allocated for breakfast, and the need to ask for permission to flush the toilet. 😔

📌 Random news in brief

Things I never thought I’d write: A singer decided it’s okay to pee on a fan on stage, although retrospectively she changed her mind, admitting this might have gone a wee “too far.” 🤨 Never mind, model Camila Costa thinks “people are [too] sensitive,” and the overall performance was “the most [punk] rock thing I ever seen.” Riiight. 🤯
There is nothing one won’t do for the perfect photoshoot... 📸 Playbook model Anna Stupak spent £5k to paint her dog’s fur orange “with the greatest safety in the world.” 🐕 🧡
Cambridge Dictionary has crowned “perseverance” as the 2021 word of the year. We need it, boys and girls. The world’s gone mad! 🙄

Before we say goodbye… 🥺

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