Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) preferred to be known simply under her initial E, due to her feeling that this at least gave the impression of her being a man, and therefore not being judged simply on the grounds of her gender. A political activist throughout her adult life, and a founding Read more…
At some point, like people in the past making towards Italy from northern Europe by land, you have to face the enormous challenge of crossing the Alps. The same applies metaphorically to anyone who wants to write or study the literature of Kent. At some point, one has to deal Read more…
The Sir Thomas Wyatt pub by London Road in Allington near Maidstone (a place, incidentally, that figured in Ian Fleming’s `Moonraker’) is one of the more visible monuments to a literary life at least started in Kent, even if the main events of that life did not happen here. This Read more…
Kent’s role as the setting for children’s literature or the home of major authors in this genre is unparalleled. E Nesbit, Mary Tourtel, Clive King all lived in the country or set parts of some of their best known books here. Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) is one of the best Read more…
Tunbridge Wells’ more recent reputation as a place of placidity and letter-writing colonels satirised in magazines like `Private Eye’ for their fury at the ill directions the world has taken sits uncomfortably with the accounts of it from its hey-day as a spa town, a place where people could go Read more…
Along the seafront at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, behind a concrete wall, stands Marine Parade, a long terrace of Victoria era houses. One of them, that at number 26, has a small plaque on the front, commemorating the fact that the German writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) lived there Read more…
The Second World War did not produce the kind of recognition for a specific group of poets associated with it than did the First. Alun Lewis (1915-1944) is perhaps the best known, and was an excellent poet, but he has none of the recognition today granted to figures like Wilfred Read more…
The Shakespeare scholar Samuel Schoenbaum in his magisterial overview of the vast amount of theories and claims about the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), `Shakespeare’s Lives’ (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991) referred to a story about the task of trying to understand the personality and life of the playwright through his Read more…
Those approaching Ashford from the west by car, going along the A20, once the main route from London before the M20 was completed in the 1990s, will come to a large roundabout. Straight ahead, the direction goes into the town itself. But the second exit runs along beside an international Read more…
Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was born in south east London, at a time when it was relatively easy to get from Brockley, his home, into the Kent countryside, which was close by. Today, it is for his 1927 work, `Tarka the Otter’ that he is best remembered. However, his first substantial Read more…