A Literary Tour of the East Coast of North America: Taking “the road less travelled”

14 September - 5 October 2012

Tour Highlights

This tour is led by Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia with the assistance of Peter Cox as ASA tour manager. Tour highlights include:

• • Share Susannah Fullerton's passion for great writing and let her tell you all about the remarkable men and women who enriched American literature.
• • spend 2 unforgettable days on Anne of Green Gables' beloved Prince Edward Island, seeing her homes and special places
• • delight in the lovely New England scenery, its covered bridges, white churches, rivers and historic buildings
• • take a glorious autumnal walk round Walden Pond where Thoreau lived and was inspired
• • walk in Robert Frost's woods and see the walls and brooks and trees that inspired some of his greatest poems
• • visit Mark Twain's extraordinary home, so typical of his extrovert and remarkable personality
• • view Impressionist paintings (that are never seen out of their collections) in gracious homes visited by great writers
• • lunch in great literary company, à la Dorothy Parker, at the Algonquin Hotel

Overnight CANADA Toronto Airport (1 night) •  Niagara-on-the-Lake (1 night) • Charlottetown (3 nights) ; USA Boston, (5 nights) • Putney (1 night) • Lenox (3 nights) • Farmington (2 nights) • Tarrytown (2 nights) • New York City (3 nights).

Sites visited CANADA Anne of Green Gables Sites (Prince Edward Island) • Anne of Green Gables – The Musical (Charlottetown, PEI) • The Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake) • Niagara Falls • McCrae House (Guelph); USA The House of the Seven Gables, Salem Maritime NHS Custom House (Salem MA) • Boston Literary Trail, Boston Freedom Trail, Ernest Hemingway Collection & John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and Isabella Gardner Museum (Boston MA) • Old Manse, Orchard House, The Wayside, Walden Pond & Thoreau's Hut (Concord MA) • The Wayside Inn (Sudbury MA) • Longfellow NHS, Harvard Square & Library • Mount Auburn Cemetery (Cambridge MA) • Robert Frost Farm (Derry NH) • Naulakha - home built for Rudyard Kipling (Dummerston) • The Mohawk Trail • The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown MA) • Herman Melville's Arrowhead (Pittsfield MA) • The Mount – Edith Wharton's Estate (Lenox MA) • Hancock Shaker Village • Norman Rockwell Museum (Stockbridge MA) • Emily Dickinson Museum (Amherst MA) • Bryant Homestead (Cummington MA) • Hill-Stead Museum and Congregational Church, Farmington (CT) • Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Mark Twain House, Noah Webster House (Hartford CT) • Sleep Hollow Cemetery • Kykuit – The Rockefeller Estate, Washington Irving's Sunnyside (Hudson Valley, NY) • Walt Whitman Birthplace (Long Island NY) • Literary Greenwich Village, Frick Collection, Algonquin Hotel, Empire State Building (New York City NY).

About the Tour

• "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
• I took the one less travelled by,
• And that has made all the difference."

In 1920 American poet Robert Frost stood where "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" and made a decision to take the road "less travelled". Millions of tourists visit Canada and the USA every year, but few take the more unusual route of seeing those countries through the eyes and words of their greatest writers. This tour offers you a unique opportunity to do so.

You will follow in the footsteps of fascinating men and women – laugh with Mark Twain, shut yourself up with Emily Dickinson in her room, walk with Thoreau to Walden Pond, shiver with Anne in the Green Gables Haunted Wood and lunch with Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Hotel. As you learn about the lives and works of these writers, you will also see the homes where they struggled and wrote, the cemeteries where they were buried, the eating places they dined in, the houses they put into their novels. Susannah, and other tour guides who join us en route, will read poems in the very places where they were written, bring to life scenes from famous novels, and show how each landscape affected the writings of each author. In great museums we will see their original manuscripts, the letters they wrote, personal items, portraits and so much more.

Theatrical performances have also been included in the tour. There will be a matinee performance at the famous Shaw festival on Niagara-on-the-Lake and Anne & Gilbert – The Musical will be watched on Anne's beloved Prince Edward Island.

Due to the tyranny of distance, the homes of many great writers have had to be left out – the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum in Alabama, the birthplace of Helen Keller, Pearl S. Buck's homes and those of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Californian ranch developed by Jack London, Willa Cather's childhood home, the gracious mansions of Gone with the Wind country, and the Mississippi home of William Faulkner. It is just not possible to include them all. The world of North American literature is an extremely rich and varied one. But the richest of these areas is the East Coast, the area chosen for this tour. As well as having more literary museums and connections than anywhere else in the country, it is also one of the loveliest parts of North America.

The tour offers great variety. You will visit simple cottages, grand mansions, graveyards, libraries, museums, nature trails, rural villages and big cities. As well as exploring the world of American literature, you will also encounter great art. American money over the centuries has purchased some of the world's most famous paintings, now on display in homes and museums. There will be French Impressionists galore, the twentieth-century art of Norman Rockwell, fine furniture, china and sculpture to admire. You will also fully experience the glories of the landscape as we take scenic drives, see great rivers and waterfalls, farmlands and forests. And throughout there will be connections with the past, and not just with the literary past – we will visit places connected with early Dutch settlement, the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression. Shakers and Puritans, the New York elite of Edith Wharton's fiction, the hard lives of colonial families and the work of farmers will all be sought out and discussed, helping us discover American society through the ages.

The tour has been planned to coincide with the Fall, when the New England colours will hopefully be at their glorious best. There will be maple syrup, lobster and clam chowder and many other traditional delicacies to sample and enjoy.

A tour reading list will be supplied in plenty of time before the trip so you can enjoy re-reading childhood favourites such as Tom Sawyer and Little Women, get to know new authors, and discover poets and novelists in preparation for the journey.

A literary tour brings together very special people – people who read, who delight in the power of words, who have rich imaginations, who love history and who have a sense of adventure. I would be delighted to have you join me in taking 'the road not taken' and find that "that has made all the difference"!