Royal Liaison · Hever, Edenbridge, Kent
Hever Castle (Henry VIII courts Anne Boleyn)
Anne Boleyn's girlhood home, where Henry VIII rode out to press a courtship that would break England from Rome. The castle keeps his love letters' story alive — 'I would you were in mine arms, or I in yours' — the correspondence of a king undone by a woman who knew the value of waiting.
Sources
Nearby on the map
Vita's beloved birthplace, which she could not inherit as a woman — the emotional wound that Woolf transfigured into 'Orlando' and that fuelled their love affair.
Documented historyBohemian & LibertineCharleston Farmhouse (Bloomsbury Group)Firle, East Sussex · EnglandThe Sussex farmhouse where the Bloomsbury Group 'lived in squares and loved in triangles' — Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant and his lover David Garnett under one painted roof, a laboratory of open relationships and bisexual love.
Documented historyHot spotLiterary PassionThe Tabard Inn site (Chaucer's Wife of Bath)London, Greater London · EnglandThe 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.
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