{"id":1728,"date":"2026-09-17T13:27:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/17\/why-the-places-we-love-in-books-can-never-quite-be-found-in-real-life\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T13:27:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:27:07","slug":"why-the-places-we-love-in-books-can-never-quite-be-found-in-real-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/17\/why-the-places-we-love-in-books-can-never-quite-be-found-in-real-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the places we love in books can never quite be found in real life"},"content":{"rendered":"
Baker Street London Underground station with silhouette motifs of Sherlock Holmes.<\/span> Peter_Fleming\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From the Bront\u00ebs\u2019 Haworth to Jane Austen\u2019s Bath, Wordsworth\u2019s Lake District and Thomas Hardy\u2019s Dorset, literary places continue to exert a powerful hold over readers.<\/p>\n

Literary tourism<\/a> appears to be enjoying renewed popularity<\/a>, from visits inspired by classic novels to the TikTok trend of turning books into travel itineraries. But what exactly are literary tourists hoping to find when they get there? The answer is more complicated than it might seem. <\/p>\n

Haworth, Bath and Dorset all exist, obviously. They can be found on a map and visited. But the Bront\u00eb moors, Austen\u2019s Bath, Wordsworth\u2019s Lakes and Hardy\u2019s Wessex are also literary reimaginings of those places. They may never have existed in quite the form readers imagine.<\/p>\n

Our fascination with literary places has a long history. Literary geography, which combines physical geography with literary studies, emerged in the late 19th century as the novel grew in popularity and, in many ways, grew alongside literary tourism.<\/p>\n

In 1899, William Lyon Phelps created his Literary Map of England<\/a>, marking locations associated with authors and literary works. A few years later, William Sharp\u2019s Literary Geography<\/a> (1904) mapped regions such as \u201cDickens land\u201d, \u201cthe Bront\u00eb country\u201d and the literary geography of the English lakes. <\/p>\n

\n \"Parade
\n Parade of people dressed in period costume from the Georgian era as part of the annual Jane Austen festival in Bath.<\/span>
\n Jeremy Richards\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These early literary maps invited readers to see where fictional and geographical worlds appeared to overlap. More than a century later, readers are still seeking those points of intersection.<\/p>\n

Thomas Hardy\u2019s Wessex<\/a> offers a notable example. Hardy borrowed and invented place names to create a fictional territory mapped onto the geography of southern England. Readers soon came to regard this invented landscape as real. Guides to its literary landmarks even appeared during his lifetime, prompting Hardy to worry that readers were taking his landscape too literally.<\/p>\n

Wessex was, in Hardy\u2019s words<\/a>, a \u201cpartly real, partly dream\u201d country: an amalgamation of imagined and real-world geography. That dream country continues to attract visitors. In 2025, a Guardian article<\/a> described a walking pilgrimage through Hardy\u2019s Dorset in search of the landscapes associated with his fiction.<\/p>\n

The novelist V.S. Naipaul offers an insight<\/a> into why literary places can become so powerful. Reflecting on reading Dickens as a child in Trinidad, Naipaul wrote of how Dickens created \u201ca city of fantasy\u201d that readers could reconstruct using what they already knew to imagine what they did not.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s remarkable about Naipaul\u2019s observation is that it turns conventional assumptions about realism upside down. Dickens\u2019s achievement was not simply that he described London accurately. His language was open enough to allow readers to create their own version of the city.<\/p>\n

The London in a reader\u2019s head could therefore become as vivid as the one on a map.<\/p>\n

Real versus imagined<\/h2>\n

When visitors reach Haworth, Grasmere or Dorset, they are not encountering those places for the first time. They have already visited them in their imagination. Their version of the landscape has been assembled from books, films, photographs, places they have visited and other cultural references. When they arrive, they compare the physical location with that imagined one.<\/p>\n

The feeling that emerges from this comparison might be described as \u201canemoia\u201d, a term coined by writer John Koenig<\/a> to describe \u201cnostalgia for a time you\u2019ve never known\u201d. Naipaul\u2019s account of reading Dickens suggests a spatial equivalent: a longing for a place never personally experienced.<\/p>\n

Literary tourism is one expression of this process. Readers do not simply consume literary landscapes but participate in creating them in their imagination. This may be particularly true of 19th-century realism. Realist writers sought to represent the social and geographical world around them, but their novels still depended on selection, omission and invention.<\/p>\n

\n \"Exterior
\n Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the historic former home of the Bronte sisters in West Yorkshire,<\/span>
\n Sergii Figurnyi<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Do museums blur fact and fiction?<\/h2>\n

Many of the most popular literary destinations are writers\u2019 houses. They promise access to authors and to the origins of literary works: the room where a novel was written, the house where a writer lived or the landscape believed to have inspired it.<\/p>\n

In this sense, literary pilgrimage attempts to anchor literature in geography. Yet these sites rarely draw a clear line between life and art. Instead, they often weave biography and fiction together. At Haworth, visitors move through domestic spaces associated with the Bront\u00eb family while simultaneously encountering the imaginative worlds of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.<\/p>\n

The Bront\u00eb Parsonage museum in Haworth derives<\/a> much of its power from bringing biography, landscape, family tragedy and fiction together in one place. Jane Austen\u2019s house at Chawton makes a similar move. Its director has described<\/a> how visitors seek intimacy with Austen through the house and hope to enter the world of her novels.<\/p>\n

\n \"Blue
\n Sherlock Holmes\u2019 blue plaque at 221b Baker Street, London.<\/span>
\n Mistervlad\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some literary sites go further by giving geographical form to places that never existed at all. Sherlock Holmes\u2019s famous address, 221B Baker Street, appears not to have corresponded to a real house when Arthur Conan Doyle began writing the Holmes stories. Indeed, the address itself was impossible<\/a> within the street numbering system of the time.<\/p>\n

Today, however, visitors can tour the Sherlock Holmes Museum \u2013 located at a now very real 221B Baker Street \u2013 as though Holmes really lived there. An imaginary location has become a geographical destination.<\/p>\n

From the earliest maps of Dickens land and Bront\u00eb country to today\u2019s literary pilgrimages, the goal has remained remarkably consistent: to find the point at which real and fictional worlds collide. Literary geography suggests that this point may never quite be reachable. Perhaps that is precisely why readers keep looking for it.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Rebecca Hutcheon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Baker Street London Underground station with silhouette motifs of Sherlock Holmes. Peter_Fleming\/Shutterstock From the Bront\u00ebs\u2019 Haworth to Jane Austen\u2019s Bath, Wordsworth\u2019s Lake District and Thomas Hardy\u2019s Dorset, literary places continue to exert a powerful hold over readers. Literary tourism appears to be enjoying renewed popularity, from visits inspired by classic novels to the TikTok trend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}