It is better to read Carlyle in your own study chair than to visit the sound-proof room and pore over the manuscripts at Chelsea….The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of his books.
— Virginia Woolf on the value of writers’ houses. On our Roundtable blog, A.N. Devers recounts the history of literary pilgrimage in her new essay “House Hunters.”