Silvia Otte
Book It: A sunflower field in Gascony, the setting for the Hours’ literary tour ‘Madame Bovary’s France’...
By Anna Kuchment
Oct. 22, 2007 issue
Last summer Bill Busse, a retired architect from Palo Alto, Calif., took a trip down the Mississippi River and through the pages of his favorite childhood stories. In the Mark Twain Mississippi River Tour (from $5,495; literarytraveler.com), Busse, his wife, Barbara, and a dozen other travelers stayed aboard a 1920s paddlewheel steamboat, heard lectures about Mark Twain and his work and visited Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Mo. The highlight: walking through the cave where Twain set some of Tom Sawyer’s and Becky Thatcher’s exploits in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “I’m not sure that people realize this was a real place,” says Busse. “It just grabbed me.”
Though trips like Mark Twain’s Mississippi appeal to all age groups, their popularity has grown as baby boomers approach their empty-nest years. “Baby boomers are a very well-read group and they travel quite a bit,” says Cathy Keefe, spokeswoman for the Travel Industry Association. A 2006 TIA survey showed that 56 percent of adults were interested in enrichment, or educational, trips. “As kids, we ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ but then we get busy with our lives and put those questions away,” says Ann Kirkland, founder of Classical Pursuits (classical pursuits.com) in Toronto. “But there comes a time when we have a little more space for reflection and we go back to those questions.”
Literary tours range from laid-back sightseeing excursions to more intellectually rigorous experiences that involve reading lists and seminars. On the more laid-back end is British Tours Ltd.’s private one-day Jane Austen trip from London ($970 for four people; british tours.com). Travelers visit her home at Chawton, where she wrote “Emma” and “Mansfield Park”; Bath, which figured prominently in many of her works, and the cathedral city of Winchester, where she is buried. On the more rigorous end is The Hours, a New York City-based company that mixes sumptuous tours of Tuscany and southern France with book discussions lead by a literature professor. Henry James’s Tuscany ($1,160 per person for six nights; thehours nyc.com) is set on an estate in the hamlet of Monterongriffoli, Italy, and includes cooking classes and truffle hunts. Madame Bovary’s France, planned for next fall, will be set in Gascony and will include visits to cheese and olive farms.
More independent-minded travelers can plan their own itineraries at literarytraveler .com, which publishes articles about writers and the places that inspire them. Later this month, the site will debut a searchable index of popular literary destinations in the United States. Many companies, including Literary Traveler and British Tours Ltd., will also lead private excursions for individuals and book groups.
The purpose of the trips is to help bring readers’ favorite books to life. Marjorie Noonan, 58, just returned from Classical Pursuits’ Mystery and Manners in Savannah: Selected Works of Flannery O’Connor ($1,960 for four nights). Her favorite moment: visiting O’Connor’s church and hearing firsthand memories of the author from her (former) fellow parishioners. It doesn’t get more lifelike than that.
