Personal reading history

Happy Valentine's Day! I've been hunkered down at home with a nasty virus, and the wintry mix outside isn't doing much to make things feel more festive. So instead, I've been daydreaming about our summer honeymoon in England.

Josh and I have been studying guidebooks galore, making lists of places to see and trading visions of our 9-day trip. I'm such an Anglophile, and lately we've watched so much Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Marple, and Call the Midwife that Josh has turned over to the Union Jack side, too. It's been great fun to page through books and websites, or even to see the London Eye in the opening credits to Sherlock and say, "We'll be there!"

(Also, several researchers have found that people get the most enjoyment out of planning a vacation, rather than going on a vacation! So far we've definitely been enjoying the planning process.)

I discovered a funny thing while flipping through a guidebook one evening. On a map of Wessex I saw the detail "Quantock Hills" and sat up straight and gasped. Why? Because when I was in high school, I was totally obsessed with the series "Sisters of the Quantock Hills" by Ruth Elwin Harris. It was about four sisters growing up in the early 1900s, and a centerpiece of all four books revolved around the trip they made to the Quantock Hills. On some level I knew that the hills existed in real life, but it was so surprising and gratifying to see them on a map.

The same thing happened with other locations: Dartmoor and Exhampton reminded me of Agatha Christie's The Sittaford Mystery, while Epping Forest recalled Lord Peter Wimsey's investigations in Unnatural Death. I told Josh, only half-joking, that we could chuck it all and just make a literary pilgrimage. And that's not counting Bloomsbury, or Jane Austen's house, or Haworth...

It's oddly satisfying to see your personal reading history written on a map. Such a small country, but one with so many writers who've produced so many long-standing works. It makes all those characters seem more real, somehow, and those works seem more like history than imagination. Now, if I can just convince Josh to go on a hike through the Quantock Hills...

Research comes from the unlikeliest of places

As evidenced by my various afternoon adventures, I love visiting historic sites. I will drag Josh to living history museums just to pretend I'm living in colonial New England (more on that soon). When my parents called to say they were planning a weekend in upstate New York, and that they hoped to visit some painters' houses and one of the Roosevelt sites, I dropped everything to join them. Nothing says vacation to me like poking around perfectly preserved homes from another era.

But why? Yes, I'm a huge history nerd, but what exactly do I love about it? (As Josh keeps asking me.)

First, I love feeling like I'm stepping into another era. There's no better way than to actually stand in the house where the Vanderbilts entertained, or to look out at the views the servants at The Elms saw. Sure, reading historical fiction transports me to another era, as does obsessively watching Downton Abbey, but there's no replacement for seeing a 1920s refrigerator in person. And that kind of visual only fuels my imagination when I'm reading.

That brings me to the main reason why I love historic houses: each visit is a treasure trove of research. Maybe the information won't be useful for my current projects, but I can always file it away in the back of my mind, or jot down an idea in my notebook, to call up later. Guides are often bursting with strange factoids--our guide at the Vanderbilt Mansion, for example, reminded us that the Vanderbilts could build what they did because they didn't have to pay income tax. (It hadn't been invented yet.) These bits of information can spark a new idea or flesh out a current one.

During that weekend in New York, my parents and I visited the homes and studios of the Hudson River School landscape painters Frederic Church and Thomas Cole. I was finishing a draft of a historical YA novel about a young woman who longs to be a painter, and I was struggling to add enough specific details that would make her world come to life. Turns out that visiting these two homes was exactly what I needed. I got to look at Thomas Cole's paintbox, which he took with him on his regular 12-mile hikes across the mountains. Cole punched studs into his personal trunk to decorate it, and Frederic Church, himself a student of Cole, filled his home with paintings he collected during his world travels. I even learned when paints began to be sold in tubes rather than as powders.

These kinds of details are gold to writers of historical fiction, and they're tough to find in regular research routes. Plus there's no replacement for soaking in the feel of an artist's home; the very atmosphere of a place can inform your work.

If you like to visit historic homes, what do you love about it? Any places to recommend?


Top two photos of Thomas Cole house; bottom three of Frederic Church house.

Afternoon Adventure: Longwood Gardens

A month ago my family met up in Philadelphia to celebrate my sister's graduation. We had some free time before the festivities began, so we drove about an hour outside of the city to the Brandywine Valley, former home of painter Andrew Wyeth and current location of some absolutely beautiful estates and gardens.

We spent the early afternoon at Longwood Gardens, a stunning estate with acres of gardens and a classic conservatory. Because it was Mother's Day, we had to navigate wandering crowds, but the whole place is so big that we hardly noticed most of the time.

Longwood began as a farm and arboretum built by the Peirce family, who purchased the property from William Penn way back in 1700. As Quakers, the Peirces respected the land and focused on planting and preserving native trees. By the time industrialist Pierre du Pont purchased the land from the Peirces in 1906, Longwood was already known for its collection of trees and aesthetic beauty.

But it was Pierre du Pont who slowly molded the property into what we see today. He used his immense fortune and his interest in conservation to develop the property, designing a range of gardens, building a gorgeous conservatory to house indoor plants, and installing of-the-moment fountains around the grounds. Inspired by the world's fairs he visited in his youth, he referenced the architecture and horticultural designs he saw at these fairs, making for an estate that is at once rooted in the past and forward-looking.

We could have spent all day at Longwood. Because we wanted to check out another estate (and eat lunch), we had to drag ourselves away after a few hours, but I definitely want to go back. We wandered through the fountain gardens, where my dad marveled at the 1930s-designed pumps.

I took a few too many pictures of utterly indulgent garden fixtures that I really, really want in my someday-garden, like follies and walls of sculpted fountains.

We spent a long time in the vegetable and fruit gardens, where I took copious notes on scenic fencing and supports for climbing vines. (And I crushed on rows of raspberry bushes.)

Horticultural Dome, Chicago World's Fair

Just before we left, we stopped in the conservatory, which reminded me of all those long-ago photographs of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, with its huge hanging plants and light-filled rooms. (It also made me feel like I'd stepped into the steampunk world of Bioshock Infinite, which begins at an alternate version of the 1893 Exposition.)

Longwood is the perfect place to slow down and relax for a day if you're in the Philadelphia area. We left inspired and refreshed, and that's exactly what we needed on a busy graduation weekend.


Works cited: Longwood Gardens History. Paul V. Galvin Library, World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Afternoon adventure: Blithewold Mansion & Gardens

One of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon (especially in the gloomy winter months) is visiting house museums. Typically these are grand old mansions that have been converted into museums for the public, like the mansions in Newport. Lissa and I grew up visiting 19th-century mansions, and we loved wandering the halls, admiring the rich furnishings and deep-piled carpets, hearing juicy stories about the houses' former inhabitants. Luckily, Rhode Island is full of these grandes dames.

One quiet afternoon in December, I drove down to Bristol to visit Blithewold Mansion & Gardens. Built in the English country manor style, it was originally owned by the Van Wickle family, namesake for the gates at Brown. The Van Wickles had their share of tragedy--patriarch Augustus died in a skeet-shooting accident--but they spent many happy summers at Blithewold, too. Now the house is open to the public, and a preservation society protects both the mansion and the extensive gardens attached.

The house was decked out for the holidays when I visited. Since daughter Marjorie Van Wickle traveled to Europe in the early 20th century, each room featured souvenirs from her travels, like picture postcards and Baedeker guidebooks. Visitors could move around the house at their own pace, and I took my time in each room, admiring the carved wooden furniture, the embellished prints and watercolors. The travel souvenirs were a special thrill--in college I wrote my senior thesis on women traveling to Europe on the Grand Tour. Deciphering the old-fashioned script on the postcards was like visiting an old friend.

Afterwards I walked around the dormant gardens and stared out to the water. There's something very peaceful about wandering the grounds of a mansion in winter. The entire estate seems muted, and when you're outside you feel like the only person in the whole world.

I was definitely in a class of my own that day--much younger than the elderly women touring the house with their friends, much older than the little girls having tea in the dining room. House museums are apparently not that popular among the twenty-something set. But the generational gap actually added to my experience.

What I love most about these visits is the feeling, however fleeting, of being transported to another era. Maybe for a moment I imagine it's 1903, and all these smiling people in photographs are still alive and well. Or maybe I get a strong memory of my grandparents and how comforting it was to visit them when I was little. For a moment I'm out of time. And when I need a break from the daily grind, there's nothing better.