"In Spirits of Place Jane Brown has chosen five famous people whose love of English rural landscape informed their work with a startling intensity. Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Rupert Brooke, Dora Carrington and L.P. Hartley all had a passion for special places that contributed to their development as artists and which formed the foundations of their lives." "In considering these personal landscapes Jane Brown brings alive the places of their affections. For E.M. Forster this was epitomized by his home, Rooksnest, which became the model for his famous Howards End. Rupert Brooke, son of a Rugby schoolmaster, was a product of the clipped quadrangles of Cambridge and immortalized the meadows at Grantchester. L.P. Hartley's holidays in Norfolk coloured his novels though he rejected his native Fens. Virginia Woolf found inspiration in her memories from childhood, reinventing the magic of the Cornish coast in her novels while living on the rolling green hills of the Sussex Downs."--Jacket.