The UK is a literary landscape. It’s quite a challenge to find anywhere in these crowded islands that hasn’t inspired a work of fiction, even if this work is yet to be published, and even if the place names in the actual novels or short stories have been changed. As a reader for several competitions for both published and yet-to-be published fiction, I’m sure I must have visited every county in the country at least once, and in some cases many times.
Brontë Country, Hardy Country, Cookson Country – crowds of us are more than happy to take holidays during which we visit the birthplaces of our favourite novelists or check out the locations where pivotal events in their fiction took place. We go to Whitby in North Yorkshire to visit Dracula Country, the town where the eponymous vampire came ashore from the mysterious shipwreck in the form of a gigantic black dog. We holiday in Lyme Regis and walk along the Cobb, the harbour where Louisa Musgrove had a great fall in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and where John Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman stared at the lashing waves.