Writers at Home: National Trust Studies

From Wordsworth at Cockermouth to Virginia Woolf at Monk's House, the homes of some dozen 19th and 20th century British writers are described and illustrated in this collection of articles issued in association with the National Trust, which manages most of these literary properties. The essaysby Ronald Blythe, Michael Holroyd, John Lehmann, Quentin Bell and seven lesser-known authorstell about the buildings and landscapes, present anecdotes about the lives and work habits of Coleridge, Carlyle, Hardy, Henry James, Kipling, Shaw and T. E. Lawrence, but only superficially relate one to the other. The illustrations provide the book's principal appeal,, but some of the captions contain embarrassing errors or misinformation. For example, in the section on Thomas Hardy, a captioned photo of the author gives his lifespan as 18041923, birthing him 36 years before the fact; another photo has the aged Hardy taking tea with the Prince and Princess of Wales, forgetting perhaps that there was no Princess of Wales from 1910 until Princess Diana was given that title in the present decade. (February 15)