Walking History - Rye its Artists and Writers

The picturesque town of Rye and the landscape it sits in have always attracted and inspired visiting writers and artists. These include the painter JMW Turner; Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais & William Holman Hunt; E Nesbit, author of The Railway Children; playwright Noel Coward; and Frances Hodgson Burnett whose children’s classic The Secret Garden was inspired by the gardens at Great Maytham Hall in nearby Rolvenden.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, the town became the centre of close-knit literary and artistic circles, with an extraordinary number of writers and artists actually living and working in Rye.
These included the American novelist Henry James, and the comic satirist EF Benson, whose Mapp and Lucia books were inspired by the the town and its residents. Another was writer Radclyffe Hall, whose 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, was one of the first to openly portray lesbianism. Modernist artists Paul Nash and Edward Burra lived in and around the town and were inspired by the local landscape. Others included children’s writer Beatrix Potter, illustrator Mabel Lucie Atwell, novelist Conrad Aitken, and Rumer Godden of Black Narcissus fame.
In this walk, we will be following in their footsteps, bringing to life the years they spent in Rye and discovering, along the way, how the town, the local landscape and its people inspired them.
A meeting point for the start of the walk will be emailed to you nearer the walk date.