the Wry Romance of Literary Rectory

Village rectories, the traditional family homes of church ministers, have had a long association with writers in Britain. For many, the Georgian rectory nestling against an historic church immediately evokes a scene from a Jane Austen novel, for others it conjures up something much darker, the parsonage at Haworth where the Bronte sisters were confined. In this engaging book, Deborah Alun-Jones selects a range of authors from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, for whom the rectory was either the childhood home that nurtured their creative talent or the place they chose to live as an adult and from which they drew inspiration. Each chapter explores the life of a writer during the time they lived at a particular rectory/ parsonage or vicarage and the effect it had on them. The story is often heartwarming, with amateur theatricals and games of tennis, but in several cases it is a tale where the serene exterior belies the tensions within - but it was those very tensions that yielded some of our greatest poetry and literature.

The English rectory nestling beside an ancient church may evoke an idyllic scene from Jane Austen but this engaging, deeply-researched book reveals that the exterior often belied tensions that have produced some of the greatest writers and poets in the English language from the Brontës to Dorothy L. Sayers and Vikram Seth.