Writers’ Retreats

Question: What children’s writer lived in Gipsy House, Great Missenden?

Answer: Roald Dahl lived in the 18th-century farmhouse called Gipsy House for 36 years.

Question: Which writer lived briefly at Brook Farm before moving to The Old Manse?

Answer: Nathaniel Hawthorne was among the original shareholders of Brook Farm and after marrying Sophia Peabody, Elizabeth’s younger sister, moved to The Old Manse, a house that had been built for the Reverend William Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s father.

Question: What Egyptian-born British writer lived for a time in a 17th-century house called Duck End?

Answer: Penelope Lively lived for several decades in Duck End, not far from Great Rollright.

Question: Max Gate in Dorchester, Dorset, England, was the home of a writer from 1885 to 1928. Who designed and lived in Max Gate?

Answer: Thomas Hardy wrote three of his best-known novels—Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge—while living at Max Gate.

Question: What was the original name of the home in which Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor lived for 13 years and died?

Answer: Flannery O’Connor’s uncle initially named the place Sorrel Farm for the horses he kept there. But when a chance meeting gave O’Connor new information that it once had been named Andalusia, her uncle reverted to the original name.

Question: Who lived in Strawberry Hill?

Answer: The 18th-century writer Horace Walpole, author of the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, transformed a small villa at Twickenham into a pseudo-Gothic showplace, and it became a tourist destination in his own lifetime.

Question: Who lived on Strawberry Lane, Yarmouth Port, Cape Cod, in a house he called the Elephant House, for his favorite animal?

Answer: Elephant House is now known as the Edward Gorey House.

Question: Which Mississippi novelist purchased an 1840s Greek Revival home and named it Rowan Oak?

Answer: William Faulkner purchased Robert Sheegog’s Greek Revival house in the 1930s and renovated much of it with his own hands.

Question: Which publishing house was named for the home of a noted English writer?

Answer: Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived in Hogarth House, London, from 1915-24 and founded the Hogarth Press there in 1917.

Question: Ham Spray House, in Ham, Wiltshire, England, was home to which Bloomsbury writer?

Answer: Lytton Strachey lived at Ham Spray House in a threesome with painter Dora Carrington (who loved him) and Ralph Partridge (whom he loved).