Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
LITERARY
lights:
KIPLING & WOOLF
This part of the country was home to
various artistic and literary figures.
Charleston
(
&
01323/811265;
www.charleston.org.uk), on the A27 at
Charleston, was the country residence
of artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan
Grant, the glittering faces of the artisti-
cally influential Bloomsbury Group early
in the 20th century. The house is a work
of art in itself, with the group's decora-
tive style covering walls, doors, and fur-
niture. There are other Bloomsbury
works, plus pieces by Picasso, Renoir,
and more. The house was also sometime
home to economist Maynard Keynes,
while Virginia and Leonard Woolf, novel-
ist E. M. Forster, and biographer Lytton
Strachey visited often. Virginia was Van-
essa's sister. The walled garden has a
Mediterranean theme, with some enig-
matic sculptures. It is open April until
October, Wednesday to Saturday 1
to 6pm (July-Aug from noon) and Sun-
day 1 to 5:30pm. Admission is £9 for
adults, £8 for seniors, £5 for children 6
to 16, and £23 for a family ticket. You
can see the house only with a tour,
included in the price, except Sundays
when it is open access. The annual liter-
ary and arts festival (late May) is a regu-
lar sell-out.
Just east of Brighton, near Lewes, is
Rodmell, where Virginia Woolf lived until
her death in 1941.
Monk's House
(
&
01323/870001;
www.nationaltrust.
org.uk), bought by Virginia and Leonard
Woolf in 1919, and Leonard remained
there until his death in 1969. Much of it
was furnished and decorated by Vanessa
Bell and Duncan Grant. The house,
where Woolf did much of her writing,
has a tenant, and so has limited visiting
hours: April to October, Wednesday and
Saturday, 2 to 5:30pm (£4.20 adults,
£2.10 children 5 to 15, £11 family ticket).
6
In the village of Burwash, on the
A265, 27 miles northeast of Brighton, is
Bateman's
(
&
01435/882302;
www.
nationaltrust.org.uk), the 17th-century
house in which author Rudyard Kipling
lived from 1902 until his death in 1936.
“Heaven looked after it in the dissolute
times of mid-Victorian restoration and
caused the vicar to send his bailiff to
live in it for 40 years, and he lived in
peaceful filth and left everything as he
found it,” wrote the creator of
The Jun-
gle Book
about the place.
Bombay-born Kipling loved Sussex, a
love expressed in
Puck of Pook's Hill,
written in 1906. The following year he
won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Kipling lived in the U.S. after his mar-
riage to Caroline Balestier in 1892. They
moved to England in 1896, to a house at
Rottingdean on the Sussex Downs,
where he wrote the line: “What should
they know of England who only England
know?” The couple set out to explore
Sussex in a steam-driven car, and one
day spotted Bateman's. “It is a good and
peaceable place standing in terraced
lawns nigh to a walled garden of old red
brick, and two fat-headed oasthouses
with redbrick stomachs, and an aged sil-
ver-grey dovecot on top,” Kipling wrote.
A World War I memorial, unveiled by
Kipling, is in Burwash church. The
church and an inn opposite appear in
Puck of Pook's Hill
under “Hal o' the
Draft.” Bateman's is filled with rugs,
bronzes, and other mementos collected
in India and elsewhere. The house and
gardens are open mid-March to October,
Saturday to Wednesday 10am to 5pm.
Admission is £7.45 for adults, £3.70 for
children 5 to 15, and £19 for a family
ticket. Gardens only are also open
November to Christmas, 11am to 4pm,
with free admission.
