Monday, January 28, 2008

Lamb House and Co-incidences

One of the books I picked up in New York was this one, Lions at Lamb House:



It's a novel about a visit paid by Sigmund Freud to Henry James at his house in Rye. Part of the pleasure of reading it was that it reminded me, not just how much I like reading Henry James, or that I'm only half way through Peter Gay's brilliant biography of Freud, but how much I love Rye - luckily just an hour away from us at home so this weekend we went to the beach at nearby Camber Sands:



Everybody and their dog (and horse) seemed to be there too:



And after our walk, we went for a cup of hot chocolate in Rye and to see Lamb House:



One of the lovely scenes in Edwin M. Yoder's novel is a dangerous bicycle ride Freud took - arms and legs akimbo - down one of the cobbled paths leading to the sea road. I could imagine it perfectly when I saw this:



And of course, another writing resident of Lamb House was E F Benson, author of the fabulous Mapp and Lucia books. It was good to see that their gossipy spirit lived on in one of the Rye windows:




And my writing prompt for today is ... looking out of the window ...

2 comments:

Cathy said...

We got married in Rye, as my mother-in-law had retired there. It is a lovely place, full of surprises and quaint corners which you have captured well in the photos.

Sarah Salway said...

A lovely place to get married - see you soon!