Literary England

No country in the world has produced a literary tradition as rich, as varied and as geographically specific as England — and no other country so faithfully preserves the landscapes and buildings associated with its great writers. Our Literary England tour is a pilgrimage through four centuries of genius, taking you to the actual places where the world's most celebrated books were written and the lives they describe were lived.

Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare, is an extraordinary experience for anyone who has ever read or seen a Shakespeare play. The half-timbered house on Henley Street where he was born in 1564 is one of the most historically significant buildings in the English-speaking world, and the restored cottage at Anne Hathaway's family home remains largely as it was when the young Shakespeare courted her there in the 1580s.

The village of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors is impossibly atmospheric — a steep cobblestoned village surrounded by wild moorland exactly as the Brontë sisters described it. The Brontë Parsonage, where Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the 1840s, contains the original manuscripts, personal effects and the tiny rooms where these extraordinary works were created.

The Lake District is inextricably linked with William Wordsworth, whose poetry transformed how both Britons and the world perceive the natural landscape. Dove Cottage at Grasmere, where he lived and wrote from 1799 to 1808, is the most important literary site in English Romanticism. Beatrix Potter's Hill Top Farm at Near Sawrey, where she wrote and illustrated Peter Rabbit and over 20 other books, completes a tour of the most beloved literary landscapes in the world.