LITERATURE:THIS IS THE third, updated edition of a guide first published in 1981. It is a prodigious undertaking, carried out, for the most part, with wit and expertise. (I'll get to the exceptions in a minute), writes Patricia Craig.
From Adelstrop and Edward Thomas, to Youghal and William Trevor, it covers a vast accumulation of places and their literary associations, assembled region by region. What distinguishes it from the general run of guides, literary or otherwise, is the charm and quirkiness of some of its inclusions. If, for example, you need to know the eventual whereabouts of Dean Swift's cradle, you will find the information here; (Brede, East Sussex). It is pleasant to think of Lewis Carroll being commemorated at Llandudno by a statue of a white rabbit, and Anna Sewell, of Black Beauty fame, by a horse trough in Norwich. It may amuse you to envisage TS Eliot fleeing from a bull in Chipping Camden and landing in a blackberry bush; or Anthony Trollope shocking the villagers of South Harting in Sussex with his weekend parties.
Such snippets are the icing on the cake, of course. They are part of a web of cross-referencing which dispenses biographical and critical information in shoals: facts, figures, assessments, unexpected connections and intriguing particularities (did you know, for instance, that Flora Thompson's customers at her post office in Hampshire included Conan Doyle and Bernard Shaw on stamp-buying errands? Or that Baroness Orczy conceived the idea of the Scarlet Pimpernel while waiting for a train at Temple underground station in London, in 1901?). You gain a new insight into Ted Hughes, perhaps, by viewing him in his role as cafeteria assistant at the London Zoo - the zoo that perked up the spirits of the novelist Christina Stead in 1947, whenever a jaded, post-war mood overtook her. Other odd pre-literary occupations we probably didn't know about include Julian MacLaren Ross's as a vacuum cleaner salesman in Bognor Regis, and Kazuo Ishiguro's stint as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral.
The book contains succinct essays on key figures such as Dickens, Hardy and George Eliot. London alone, understandably, rates more than 60 pages and contains a splendid photograph of Keats's house in Hampstead (the guide is, mostly, very well illustrated) - a house in which the poet can't have spent much time during his short life, as he crops up all over the place: at the Fox and Hounds in Burford Bridge one minute, admiring the "neatness" of Winchester the next, dashing off to Ben Nevis - at which point, the authors tell us, "he wrote a sonnet on the summit".
One place in which Keats does not appear is Donaghadee, to which he travelled in 1818 - but this is not surprising since Donaghadee does not get in at all, despite being the birthplace of the early feminist novelist "Sarah Grand" (The Beth Book, published in 1897, etc). I'm aware that the editors, sensibly, make no claim for comprehensiveness - but I can't help pointing out that Ireland, or at least parts of it, comes in for very cursory treatment indeed. It seems to have been appended as an afterthought. The country is covered province by province, starting with Ulster (three and a quarter pages). Ulster's chief literary importance would appear to relate to the people who arrived from elsewhere. Of course it's interesting to learn, for example, that Trollope wrote The Warden in Whiteabbey (did he throw wild parties there as well?) - but this should have been an adjunct to the main text, ie native writers. With Ulster, I'm afraid, productive idiosyncrasy begins to shade into idiocy. Under "Belfast", for instance, too much space is accorded to an 18th-century Cumbrian dialect poet called Robert Anderson, while the list of exclusions will surely raise a few hackles in the north. It would be tedious to enumerate these, so I will just say that John Hewitt is left out, along with Robert Harbinson, Sam Thompson, Glenn Patterson, Jennifer Johnston (living in Derry) and Medbh McGuckian. The most startling omission, though, is Brian Moore, Belfast's most prominent novelist of the 20th century, born in Clifton Street in 1921 and no less possessed by his birthplace than James Joyce was by Dublin.
A PERSON COMING to this guide with a clean slate would gain an impression that only two women writers had any connection with Ulster, and that one of them - the hymn-writer and bane of socialists with her All Things Bright and Beautiful, Mrs Alexander - was a native of Leinster. The other, Lady Dufferin, is remembered for her impersonation of an Irish emigrant with a plaintive address to his dead wife: "I'm sitting on the stile, Mary/ Where we sat side by side." Our hypothetical uninformed reader would also come away from the book believing that no one in Ulster ever wrote in Irish - Donegal writers in Irish or, for that matter, English, are largely absent, and you find no mention of South Armagh poets such as Seamus Dall Mac Cuarta or Art Mac Cubhthaigh.
There's an element of inconsistency here, since writers in the Irish language from Kerry or Connemara, for example, are quite well represented. (Not if they're recent, though: no Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill or Michael Hartnett.) In fact the other three provinces, Munster, Leinster and Connacht, fare rather better than Ulster on the whole - though we've had quite enough of the aforementioned Mrs Alexander by the time she turns up being born in Dublin. Trollope in Ireland, too, is as ubiquitous as Keats in Britain. Other incomers include the strait-laced Mrs Henry Wood, living, apprehensively, one feels, in Mallow with the Rakes. As well, you have Laurence Sterne falling into a mill-race in Co Wicklow and Graham Greene getting down to The Heart of the Matter on Achill Island.
A selection of distinguished literary Irishwomen, from Maria Edgeworth to Mary Lavin, is included. The latter comes into focus as a young girl getting to grips with rural Co Meath in the 1920s, and reading Russian novels in Bective. You find Edna O'Brien growing up in a part of Co Clare celebrated for its chipboard factory. Elizabeth Bowen is here, under "Bowen's Court", her ancestral home - but oddly not in connection with her birthplace, Dublin. Only one major Irish writer, James Joyce, rates a separate essay - not Yeats or Synge or Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw. Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain are properly assigned to Cork city - but no mention of O'Faolain's affairs with Elizabeth Bowen and Honor Tracy. Still in Cork, Daniel Corkery is credited with having written a book called The Study of Irish Literature (it should be Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature). Never mind. The overall effect of this Oxford guide, flaws, lacunae, literary lapses and all, is to leave you with the sense of something as brimfull of goodness as one of those 18th-century Irish songs celebrating abundance (not mentioned) - 'Se Fath mo Bhuadhartha, for instance, with its blossoming trees, its lashings of cream and honey.
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Patricia Craig is the editor of The Oxford Book of Ireland (1998) and The Ulster Anthology (2006). Her memoir, Asking for Trouble, was published by Blackstaff in 2007
The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland (Third Edition), Edited by Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins, Oxford University Press, 370pp. £30