Village rectories, the traditional family homes of church ministers, have had a long association with writers in Britain. For many, the Georgian rectory nestling against an historic church immediately evokes a scene from a Jane Austen novel, for others it conjures up something much darker, the parsonage at Haworth where the Bronte sisters were confined. In this engaging book, Deborah Alun-Jones selects a range of authors from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, for whom the rectory was either the childhood home that nurtured their creative talent or the place they chose to live as an adult & from which they drew inspiration. Each chapter explores the life of a writer during the time they lived at a particular rectory/ parsonage or vicarage & the effect it had on them. The story is often heartwarming, with amateur theatricals & games of tennis, but in several cases it is a tale where the serene exterior belies the tensions within but it was those very tensions that yielded some of our greatest poetry & literature.