6 World Famous Literary Figures From Surrey & Hampshire, UK

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Photo: Jane Austen's House, Chawton, Alton (left side)

Many author residences are now occupied by new owners and show little evidence of the literary talent that originated there but an exception is Jane Austens house in Chawton, just outside Alton which has been preserved as a museum in her memory. Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life in this house, revising Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey; and writing Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion.

1. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) – Lived in Chawton, just outside Alton.
2. Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898) – Wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through The Looking Glass (1872).  A famous Guildford resident, buried at The Mount Cemetery just outside Guildford.  Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930) – Lived in Hindhead at Undershaw – a striking redbrick house that he built himself.  He wrote the most famous Sherlock Holmes story here:  The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1902. It was used as a hotel from 1924 to 2004, then became vacant and fell into a bad state of repair. In 2007 an Urgent Works Notice (UWN) was served to the owner requiring measures be taken to arrest damage and decay. It has recently been suggested in a Concept Statement to Waverley Borough Council that Undershaw should be restored to its former grandeur incorporating artifacts and exhibition material celebrating the close association with the hill-top writers; perhaps with a statue to Conan Doyle as a piece of civic art. The Waverley Borough Council have stepped in to undertake work on the property.
4. J. M. Barrie (1860 – 1937) – Lived at Black Lake Cottage in Farnham, Surrey where he wrote Peter Pan following an inspiring summer spent here around the lake with the Llewelyn Davies Boys.
5. H.G. Wells (1866 – 1946) – Wrote The War of the Worlds (1898) and The Invisible Man (1897) at his home in Woking. His inspiration for the novel came from the nearby vast and desolate heathland.
6. Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) – Author of Brave New World (1932) was born in Godalming. Huxley was a keen cyclist and frequently visited the Surrey Hills around Hindhead and the Devil’s Punchbowl.

A useful guide to the writers of Surrey is The Hilltop Writers: A Victorian Colony Among the Surrey Hills by Wilfred Robert Trotter.  The guide refers to sixty-five writers who chose to populate the hilltops around Haslemere and Hindhead in the last decades of the nineteenth century.