Explore the places and discover the people behind the books on a literary tour with Susannah Fullerton.

Visiting places connected with literature brings the excitement of recognizing homes and landscapes long familiar to the imagination, of connecting loved novels and poems with the lives and environments of the authors and seeing firsthand the countryside they described. An ASA Literary Tour led by Susannah includes visiting writers’ homes, seeing original manuscripts, attending theatre performances, browsing museums, and much more. In gardens, ruins, castles, villages, churches and graveyards you will discover the effect of environment on a writer and investigate the role played by a sense of place in literary creation.

15 SEP – 5 OCT 2023
Exploring More Literary Landscapes of England
Exploring More Literary Landscapes of England will follow in the footsteps of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, Laurence Sterne, Rupert Brooke, Nancy Mitford, Agatha Christie and many other classic and popular writers. We will see the buildings they lived in, the fields and countryside that inspired them, the museums they have left behind them, and the manuscripts they laboured over. From stately homes to cottages, from graveyards to cathedrals, from tiny villages to bustling towns, from lush countryside to barren uplands, from the dales to the seaside, we will follow a variety of poets, novelists and playwrights and learn about their lives and writings.

8 JUN – 27 JUN 2024
In Search of Literary France 2024
This tour offers you the opportunity to see France through the eyes of great writers and their works. You will learn about their fascinating lives – the strings of mistresses, the debts, the scandals, the meals they enjoyed, their travels – and you will see the landscapes that inspired them and the places where they wrote. You will meet playwrights – Corneille and Victor Hugo; novelists such as Flaubert, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Proust, Alain-Fournier, Colette, George Sand, Jules Verne and Zola; and the poets, Rimbaud and his lover Verlaine. You will see where they are buried, admire statues erected in their honour, wander through their homes and dine where they dined. Their characters have become part of our imaginative landscapes, but now you will see the physical landscapes they inhabited as well – the provinces which stifled Madame Bovary, the half-timbered villages where Guy de Maupassant’s characters lead their often tragic lives, and the bedroom where Proust’s narrator eats a little cake and experiences something extraordinary.

1 SEP – 21 SEP 2024
Exploring the Literary Landscapes of England 2024
Visiting places connected with literature brings the excitement of recognizing homes and landscapes long familiar to the imagination, of connecting loved novels and poems with the lives and environments of the authors and seeing first hand the countryside they described. We will visit writers’ homes, view original manuscripts and enjoy theatre performances. In gardens, ruins, castles, villages, churches and graveyards we will examine the effect of environment on a writer and investigate the role played by a sense of place in literary creation. You will discover how the elegant classicism of Bath influenced Jane Austen, how a bleak industrial landscape shaped D.H. Lawrence and what it was about the wild moors that fired the Brontës’ imaginations. The tour begins in Chaucer’s Canterbury, moves through the gentle Hampshire countryside of Jane Austen to the Dorset of Thomas Hardy. James Herriot’s Yorkshire, the lakes of the Romantic poets and Shakespeare’s Stratford are included. Special visits to homes not open to the general public are arranged. Childhood favourites are not forgotten. We visit Beatrix Potter’s charming farmhouse and play poohsticks on the original Poohsticks Bridge. Throughout the tour our exploration of literary landscapes is enriched by dramatic readings and expert guides. Discover on this tour the literary delights of ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’!

11 OCT – 29 OCT 2024
Sicily: A Dimension of the Imagination 2024
Sicily was inhabited 10,000 years ago. Strategically located in the Mediterranean, it became a crossroads of history, a pawn of conquest and empire, and a melting pot for all who came to its shores. Palermo is said to be the most conquered city on earth! This tour gives you the opportunity to explore this seductively beautiful island from literary, historical and artistic angles. The land of the Cyclops has been praised by poets from Homer to Virgil and there have, over the centuries, been many visiting writers. From Cervantes to Truman Capote, Sicily has lured authors from other lands, and many of them have written evocatively about the ruins, food, rich culture and people. We will follow in the footsteps of many of these literary visitors, from Goethe to D.H. Lawrence, Cicero to Lawrence Durrell, Alexander Dumas to Peter Robb. Shakespeare set two plays on the island, although he never actually visited. View Sicily through the eyes of an intriguing range of great writers.

9 MAY – 29 JUN 2025
Exploring More Literary Landscapes of England 2025
We will follow in the footsteps of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, Laurence Sterne, Rupert Brooke, Nancy Mitford, Agatha Christie and many other classic and popular writers. We will see the buildings they lived in, the fields and countryside that inspired them, the museums they have left behind them, and the manuscripts they laboured over. From stately homes to cottages, from graveyards to cathedrals, from tiny villages to bustling towns, from lush countryside to barren uplands, from the dales to the seaside, we will follow a variety of poets, novelists and playwrights and learn about their lives and writings.

This will be a cultural journey as well as a literary one, with visits to smuggling museums and churches, to a Roman palace and to a fascinating island. There will be historic properties and sites – the town of Captain Cook’s apprenticeship, Queen Victoria’s beloved Osborne House, one of England’s greatest universities – and there will be beautiful rural scenery to walk through and enjoy.

As so many great writers have produced plays, it is appropriate that dramatic performance should be included in this tour. We will watch a play at a spectacular open-air theatre on the Cornish coast.

Film is not forgotten. We will visit the locations used in the filming of several great BBC dramas and movies, such as the unforgettable Castle Howard used for Brideshead Revisited. Also included is Stamford which has been both Middlemarch, and Meryton in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice.

We will, throughout the tour, be joined by a variety of guides, specialists on the colleges of Cambridge, on licentious Brighton, on Laurence Sterne’s beloved Shandy Hall and on Rupert Brooke’s peaceful Grantchester. Susannah will brief us on all the visits to writers’ homes and landscapes and will do dramatic readings of poems, letters and extracts from novels, suitable to each location. Her ‘Tour Book’ will be a written accompaniment to the journey, as well as a memento that you can enjoy after returning home.

Susannah’s first ‘Literary Landscapes of England’ tour took ASA travellers to the homes of the great ‘classic’ writers of English literature – Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontës and others. This second tour frequently touches on those great writers – we find Jane Austen and Dickens in Portsmouth, Elizabeth Gaskell in Whitby, Lord Byron in Cambridge – but it also includes a variety of more modern and popular writers – Agatha Christie, A.S. Byatt whose marvellous novel Possession won the Booker Prize, Winston Graham whose Poldark series created a dramatic rise in Cornish tourism, Graham Greene, and those infamous Mitford Girls. Also included are twentieth century poets such as Rupert Brooke and modern novelists Patrick O’Brian and Mary Wesley. The tour aims to be varied, informative and fun.

You will travel in the company of fellow Australians who share your fascination with good books, your delight in the power of words. Encounter deeply loved writers and make acquaintance with new ones. Treat yourself and explore more English literary landscapes in 2025.

7 SEP – 27 SEP 2025
Exploring the Literary Landscapes of England 2025
Visiting places connected with literature brings the excitement of recognizing homes and landscapes long familiar to the imagination, of connecting loved novels and poems with the lives and environments of the authors and seeing first hand the countryside they described. We will visit writers’ homes, view original manuscripts and enjoy theatre performances. In gardens, ruins, castles, villages, churches and graveyards we will examine the effect of environment on a writer and investigate the role played by a sense of place in literary creation. You will discover how the elegant classicism of Bath influenced Jane Austen, how a bleak industrial landscape shaped D.H. Lawrence and what it was about the wild moors that fired the Brontës’ imaginations. The tour begins in Chaucer’s Canterbury, moves through the gentle Hampshire countryside of Jane Austen to the Dorset of Thomas Hardy. James Herriot’s Yorkshire, the lakes of the Romantic poets and Shakespeare’s Stratford are included. Special visits to homes not open to the general public are arranged. Childhood favourites are not forgotten. We visit Beatrix Potter’s charming farmhouse and play poohsticks on the original Poohsticks Bridge. Throughout the tour our exploration of literary landscapes is enriched by dramatic readings and expert guides. Discover on this tour the literary delights of ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’!