Literary Passion

The wild, windswept ruin traditionally taken as the setting for the Earnshaw home in Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights' — the most famous doomed passion in English literature. A Brontë Society plaque (1964) notes the buildings never matched her description but the desolate moorland setting 'may have been in her mind'.

The Sitwells' Derbyshire seat is widely credited as the model for Wragby Hall in D.H. Lawrence's once-banned 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', the century's most notorious tale of a lady and her gamekeeper

Lawrence, raised nearby, based the fictional colliery village Tevershall on Teversal; the surrounding woods stand in for the setting of the novel's al fresco trysts. Teversal Manor has been marketed on its 'racy reputation'.

Burns called the Globe his 'favourite howff'; here he had a passionate affair with barmaid Anna Park that inspired the song 'The Gowden Locks of Anna'. Their daughter was raised by Burns's wife Jean Armour

The cliff-side home of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, whose passionate, tempestuous, hard-drinking marriage was as famous as his verse; the writing shed overlooking the estuary is preserved as if he had just stepped out.

Stoker holidayed beneath the ruined abbey in 1890 and set his Count's landfall here — the black hound leaping ashore, Lucy sleepwalking to the churchyard bench for the novel's most transgressively erotic scenes. Whitby has embraced its gothic seduction ever since.

From her sickroom at 50 Wimpole Street, under a father who forbade his children to marry, Elizabeth Barrett conducted a secret courtship of 574 letters with Robert Browning — then slipped out to marry him and flee to Italy. 'How do I love thee?' was written in this house's shadow.

The Hampstead villa where Keats fell desperately for the girl next door — literally next door, the two households sharing the house — and wrote 'Bright Star' for her. Engaged but too poor and too ill to marry, he sailed for Rome wearing her ring and died at 25 with her letters unopened, too painful to read.

The moor-edge parsonage where three sisters, walking the dining-room table nightly, invented Rochester, Heathcliff and a new voltage of desire in English fiction. Charlotte married her father's curate in the church next door in 1854 — the quietest wedding of the century's most passionate imagination.

The cottage where Austen revised and wrote the six novels that taught the English how to fall in love — every drawing-room glance, every letter pressed into a gloved hand, composed at a twelve-sided walnut table small enough to hide when visitors called.

One stone pier, two of literature's charged moments: Louisa Musgrove's reckless leap into Captain Wentworth's arms in 'Persuasion', and Fowles's hooded Sarah Woodruff staring out to sea — the most smouldering opening image in post-war English fiction.

The hidden house du Maurier trespassed into as a young woman and loved all her life — the original of Manderley, whose dreaming opening line the world knows by heart. 'Rebecca' made obsession, jealousy and a dead woman's unseen erotic power into a national bestseller.

The tiny lakeland cottage of William, his adored sister Dorothy — whose journals record wearing his wedding ring the night before he married — and his bride Mary. The intensity of the brother-sister bond has fascinated and divided scholars ever since; the documented record is devotion, and this entry claims nothing more.

The steep Uplands semi where Dylan Thomas wrote two-thirds of his poems in a bedroom the size of a confession box — the sensuous, rolling voice of 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' formed here before London, Caitlin and the Boathouse. Pair with Laugharne for the marriage.

The thatched farmhouse where the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare courted Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior — and married her three months before their daughter's arrival made the timeline eloquent. The settle by the fire is still called the courting bench.

The pilgrims' departure point of the Canterbury Tales — and the stage entrance of the Wife of Bath, five husbands down and gloriously unrepentant, English literature's first great celebrant of appetite. The inn is gone; the voice has never stopped talking.