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Rising rather surprisingly from where the narrowish cobbled lane in the centre of Rye widens out on a bend, Lamb House is an elegant Georgian red brick building with large sash windows and three steps up to a graceful front door.\u00a0 The wall that curves graciously round a beautiful garden that became Henry James\u2019s joy and retreat and was designed by his friend Alfred Parsons.<\/p>\n
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Lamb House was built in 1722-3 for James Lamb, wine merchant and local politician.\u00a0 When George 1\u2019s ship came aground at Camber Sands in 1726, this was the house the locals considered most appropriate to take him.\u00a0 What is now known as the King\u2019s Room was Lamb\u2019s own bedroom, given up to the exhausted monarch who later became godfather to Lamb\u2019s son.\u00a0 \u00a0Historic oak panelling survives in that room and in the Oak Parlour and the whole gracious house is distinguished without being grandiose: the kind of place you can imagine living happily.<\/p>\n
In 1743 an extension, \u2018The Garden Room\u2019, was added to the house.\u00a0 Intended as a dining area, this became a favourite spot for James to write.\u00a0 Sadly, it was hit by a bomb in WW2 and nothing of it remains.<\/p>\n
Henry James<\/strong><\/p>\n Two and a half centuries later, Henry James was licking his wounds after the failure of his play \u2018Guy Domville\u2019, in London in 1895.\u00a0 He went and hid with a friend in Rye where he fell in love with Lamb House.\u00a0 He rented it then two years later, bought it outright.\u00a0 He wrote his psychological ghost\/horror novella \u2018The Turn of the Screw\u2019 in his London apartment while Lamb House was being refurbished, but it was in his new home that he wrote some of his most famous novels, including \u2018The Wings of the Dove\u2019, \u2018The Ambassadors\u2019 and \u2018The Golden Bowl\u2019, earning the nickname of \u2018The Master\u2019.<\/p>\n While James was living in Rye, a tribe of literary greats visited Lamb House including H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, Max Beerbohm, and Edith Wharton.\u00a0\u00a0 Despite her reservations about his writing, Virginia Woolf was another visitor.\u00a0 Touchingly, James was a very generous host but is recorded as mourning over left-overs from meals, as money was always a worry.<\/p>\n \u2018The Master\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n An American, born in 1843, Henry James grew up in an intellectual household in Manhattan, in New York.\u00a0 His brother William became a psychologist and a profound interest in the conflict between motivation and action and consequences also drives James\u2019s writing.\u00a0 His wealthy family travelled frequently to Europe, James was fluent in French and settled in Europe during his thirties, enabling him to explore the impact of European culture and society on his protagonists.\u00a0 He became a British Citizen in 1915 after a lifetime writing plays, literary criticism, biography, autobiography and journalistic articles.<\/p>\n Influenced hugely by his reading of French and English realism rather than his unorthodox education, Henry James is admired for the subtlety of his prose and his focus on the internal life of his characters.\u00a0 Somerset Maugham commented that “The great novelists, even in seclusion, have lived life passionately. Henry James was content to observe it from a window\u2026” but continued, “The fact remains that those last novels of his, notwithstanding their unreality, make all other novels, except the very best, unreadable.”<\/p>\n James was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916.\u00a0 His sentences may be long, and British writers struggled with his multi-layered delicacy, but his understanding of inner realities nonetheless provided a spring-board for 20th<\/sup> century writers like Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, paving the way for the stream-of-consciousness style and convincing psychology we expect today.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Later Literary Connections<\/strong><\/p>\n A number of distinguished writers and publishers have lived at Lamb House, which was given to the National Trust in 1950.<\/p>\n EF Benson<\/strong><\/p>\n Henry James\u2019s friend EF Benson moved into Lamb House in 1919, becoming Mayor of Rye from 1934-7.\u00a0 A prolific writer, he is best known now for his \u2018Mapp and Lucia\u2019 novels, set in a fictional version of Rye called \u2018Tilling\u2019.\u00a0 Lamb House and Rye provided the film location for the 2014 television adaptation, bringing the connection pleasingly full circle.<\/p>\n H Montgomery-Hyde<\/strong><\/p>\n An early human rights campaigner, author, biographer, barrister and politician, H Montgomery Hyde lived at Lamb House from 1963-67.\u00a0\u00a0 He was also a second cousin of Henry James.<\/p>\n Rumer Godden<\/strong><\/p>\n Author of over 60 novels and non-fiction books, Rumer Godden is best known for the Oscar-winning \u2018Black Narcissus\u2019, starring Deborah Kerr.\u00a0 She also won the first Whitbread Children\u2019s Book Award for \u2018The Diddakoi\u2019 in 1972.\u00a0 Godden lived at Lamb House from 1967-74 and is buried in Rye church yard.<\/p>\n
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