From Virginia Woolf’s country cottage to Ernest Hemingway’s Florida estate, the homes of great writers continue to captivate readers as spaces where great minds sought a tranquil retreat.

Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy’s home inTula, Russia.

Virginia Woolf and her husband lived together in Monk’s House, a serene 17th-century clapboard cottage in East Sussex, England, from 1919 until her untimely death in 1941. Here she worked on such novels as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and also held her famous Bloomsbury Group 

In 1837, a year after his marriage, Charles Dickens moved to this Georgian terraced home in central London. It was here that he wrote Oliver Twist, making Dickens a household name throughout the city. In 1925 the house was converted into the Charles Dickens Museum, which holds some of the best relics from the writer’s life.

With the armistice between the Allies and the Germans signed in 1918, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s military service ended in basic training. In 1919 the unknown writer moved home to his parents’ house, Summit Terrace, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Young, ambitious, and full of nervous energy, Fitzgerald completed his first and, during his lifetime, most well-received novel, This Side of Paradise. 

In 1930, after a string of stories had sold, the eventual Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner bought his house at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. Six years after Faulkner’s death in 1962, the home was declared a National Historic Landmark.

 

 

In 1897 Edith Wharton published her first book, The Decoration of Houses (coauthored with Ogden Codman Jr.), in which she champions spirited interior design “as a branch of architecture.” Decorating the interior and surrounding grounds of the Mount (erected in 1902), Wharton took immense pride in the proportion, harmony, simplicity, and sustainability of her estate. The first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, she became an influential figure in early-20th-century residential design as well

 

From 1874 to 1891, Mark Twain lived in this Victorian Gothic in Hartford, Connecticut, home with his young family. The top floor doubled as a billiards room and Twain’s writing study. It was here that the American master penned a few of his enduring works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

 

Fresh off the dramatic struggles of his father’s suicide and the emotional highs of his successful second novel, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway moved his family to Key West in 1931. Completed in 1851, the Spanish Colonial estate—where the writer penned such legendary short stories as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber—was built with local limestone. The home was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1968.