Revisiting

Revisiting a place, tracing its echoes, proves fruitful material for novelists. Brideshead Revisited opens with Charles unwittingly sent back to the stately home whose inhabitants provided wine, strawberries and complicated relationships. To the Lighthouse is a novel broken in half by WWI and Mrs Ramsay’s death, a changed cast of characters returning to the island home after the interlude. In Great Expectations the marshes become the weight that Pip wants to ignore as he flees from his upbringing. Miss Havisham’s house, however, never changes, remaining fixed and stagnant from visit to visit. All demonstrate the importance of place. Settings wrap around...