These are high times for house-hunters of a literary bent. The three-bedroom semi in Shepperton, Surrey, where JG Ballard lived for nearly 50 years has just gone on sale for a relatively modest £475,000, while those stuck in the rental market can console themselves with the Bloomsbury house where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath first got together.
Hughes, who rued the “unlit and unlovely lavatory” in the poem “18 Rugby Street” might be surprised to find a price tag of £5,850 a month on a property which he described as a stage-set for “the love struggle in all its acts and scenes”.
Ballard lived in Shepperton from 1960 to 2009 and wrote Crash, Empire of the Sun and other 20th-century classics there. Hughes was merely passing through the “Victorian torpor and squalor” of multi-tenanted 18 Rugby Street, which he recalled in Birthday Letters.
Looking at the recent asking prices of authors’ former homes, it is striking how well many of them lived. In September, George Eliot’s sprawling family home Adam Bede House, near Ashbourne, was listed at £950,000.
Last year, Enid Blyton’s cottage, Old Thatch in Buckinghamshire, was put on the market for £1.85m, and the Devon home of Henry Williamson (he bought the land for it after winning the £100 Hawthornden prize in 1927 for Tarka the Otter) was offered at £900,000.
Agatha Christie’s double-fronted mews house in Chelsea was expected to make £2,295,000 in 2013, and in the same year Rudyard Kipling’s seaside home, The Elms in Rottingdean, Sussex, went on sale for more than £1.5m.
Daphne du Maurier’s four bedroom cottage near Fowey, with its Cornish sea views, was marketed at close to £2m in 2011. In 2003, the house in Oxford where Ian McEwan wrote Atonement – complete with blue and gold wallpaper up the staircase – was for sale at £1.35m.
There are relative bargains to be had, though, for those on a modern author’s budget. In 2011, a house in Tutshill with “Joanne Rowling slept here circa 1982” carved into a wooden windowsill was put up for sale for nearly £400,000. In the same year, John Updike’s boyhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania, was sold on eBay for $499,000 (currently about £361,000).
