Ruth Scurr

How do authors’ gardens inspire them?

A sumptuous coffee-table book in which writers from Henry James to Frances Hodgson Burnett are briefly glimpsed while passing through the beautiful spaces that outlast them

Virginia Woolf’s garden at her home Monk’s House in East Sussex. [Richard Hanson]
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  • The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors

    Jackie Bennett

    Frances Lincoln, pp. 240, £30

When Henry James moved to Lamb House in the Sussex coastal town of Rye, he admitted that he could hardly tell a dahlia from a mignonette: ‘I am hopeless about the garden, which I don’t know what to do with and shall never, never know – I am densely ignorant.’

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When I first heard about ebooks, I was horrified. Something deep within me flinched. Surely, I thought – my surface brain trying to rationalise this atavistic spasm – the tactile reality of books is an intrinsic part of the joy of books? Nowadays I only read a physical book if there really is no alternative

Because you read about henry james

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