Teversal Manor, referenced many times in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is for sale.
By Nigel Burnham
When you’re selling your house in a time of severe economic recession it helps to have a selling point – and there are few better selling points in the U.K. than owning a house with a literary connection.
Literary heritage is big business here. A record 19 million visitors toured National Trust houses last year, including several associated with Britain’s most celebrated writers.
At one time, more than 100,000 Beatrix Potter aficionados flocked to her Cumbrian cottage, Hill Top, each year, while Thomas Carlyle’s town house in Chelsea, London, and Red House, William Morris’ Arts and Crafts residence in Kent, are also very popular visitor attractions.
Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice
For years, fans turned up at Green Hedges, Enid Blyton’s now demolished home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and today visitors drop in to the genteel house in Chawton, Hampshire, to see where Jane Austen wrote Pride And Prejudice.
Wandering around the home of an author is as close as most people get – but actually residing where a playwright or novelist once put quill to parchment or fingers to battered typewriter is a literary buff’s dream come true.
Although some buyers are principally concerned with price and finish, a cultural connection can make it much easier to market a property.
So the Nottinghamshire manor house that was the inspiration for Wragby Hall in D.H. Lawrence’s steamy (and once banned) novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover should not take too long to sell, having just gone on the market at £1million.
Officially known as Teversal Manor, the six-bedroom house is referenced many times in the 1928 novel because it’s where Constance Chatterley lives with her paralysed husband Clifford, and from which she tiptoes out at night to meet her gamekeeper lover, Oliver Mellors.
“During the First World War, the house was used for the rehabilitation of soldiers,” says owner Janet Marples, 69. “They put a slope down to the second garden terrace for wheelchairs and it’s said D.H. Lawrence got the idea for Constance’s husband Clifford from that, as he is in a wheelchair too.”
It isn’t just houses with literary connections that sell for inflated prices. A stretch of beach overlooking a lighthouse that inspired one of Virginia Woolf’s most famous novels recently fetched £80,000 at auction.
The 76-acre Upton Towans beach in Gwithian, Cornwall – where Woolf spent many family holidays as a child – affords terrific views of the lighthouse on nearby Godrevy Island, which became the inspiration for her 1927 classic To The Lighthouse.
But houses with literary connections are what have been making the serious money lately.
Remember the Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, the frog who fished the Dalguise Beat for his dinner? Burnside Cottage in Perthshire, Scotland, where his creator Beatrix Potter lived for several years, is thought to have been the inspiration for this culinary tale and, for £760,000, you could recently have had this three-bed cottage and more than a mile’s worth of Mr. Jeremy’s double fishing bank.
In the south of England, the passion of The Forsyte Saga materialized at Wingstone Manor Farm, where John Galsworthy lived from 1906 to 1924. His glorious five-bed house nestles in the pastures of Dartmoor national park. For £1.55 million, you could also have had two large drawing rooms, each with wood-burning stoves, a kitchen-diner, a range of outbuildings, riding land and spectacular views from the wisteria-clad veranda.
Closer to London, it is easy to believe that Toad, Ratty, Mole and Badger and the rest of their Wind in the Willows chums were conjured up by Kenneth Grahame at the magnificent seven-bedroom Martens House (Toad Hall?) in Wargrave, Berkshire, an elegant yet unpretentious Elizabethan manor standing on the reaches of the Thames, on (yes, really) Willow Lane and costing a cool £2.49 million.
Finally, in England’s south-west corner, the white-washed seaside coach house in Cornwall where Daphne Du Maurier lived in the 1940s, has recently sold for £1.875 million. Situated in its own sandy cove in the harbour town of Fowey, the four-bedroom house – along with its enchanting garden and surrounding area – is thought to have inspired the setting of her novel Frenchman’s Creek.
The homes where writers, playwrights or poets penned their masterpieces have an enduring fascination.
Interest in houses with literary connections is now so great that some real estate agents are hiring qualified house historians. One, Melanie Backe-Hansen, specialises in researching the history of the homes of writers like P. G. Wodehouse and H. G. Wells.
“Certain places are a magnet for writers,” she says. “Carlyle Mansions, on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, is referred to as ‘the writers block’ as it’s been home to well-known figures such as Ian Fleming and T. S. Eliot. Giving a house a link with an author has obvious benefits, and adds cachet to the address.”
James Bailey, of real estate firm Henry and James, says that George Orwell came to his rescue when a house he was trying to sell on a busy road was attracting little interest.
“When we discovered Orwell had lived there, suddenly buyers appeared and it sold very quickly. A literary connection doesn’t necessarily mean a higher price, but it does make it more saleable.”
Sometimes a house with a literary connection can sell very quickly and at an relatively low price.
The home where the Bronte sisters were born was recently purchased by a private buyer who may turn it into a bistro.
In West Yorkshire, fans of the Brontes make pilgrimages to the parsonage in Haworth where the literary sisters created their brooding romantic characters playing out their tempestuous passions on bleak, windswept moors.
The Bronte Birthplace Trust’s last-minute attempt to buy the nearby 1802 house where Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Bronte were born floundered in February after it had difficulty raising the money and was gazumped by a private buyer.
The four-bedroom home in which the children were born and raised between 1815 and 1820 before the Brontes moved to Haworth sold for a modest £120,000. The Bronte Birthplace Trust had wanted to acquire the house and convert it into a Bronte museum, bookshop and café to help regenerate the village, just west of Bradford, but it may now become a bistro.
