From Charlotte Brontë’s Norton Conyers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Canford
Court – the little known locations that inspired the most famous homes
in literature. Phyllis Richardson, House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life (Unboun, 2017). Phyllis Richardson, The Guardian
e un lungo articolo sulla traduzione, che in realtà mi ha attratto per la descrizione iniziale di una casa londinese:
A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a
large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was
perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly
behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums.
It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’
generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental
rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs
which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite
old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past.
Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of
lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They
did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that
the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly
middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead.
I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. Benjamin Moser, Liberties
