In this house Find!

One of Hampshire's literary heroines is the poet and novelist Julia Darling.She was born and brought up in Winchester but made her name with the Poetry Virgins in the North East. She then turned her hand to short stories and published her first novel, Crocodile Soup, in 1998. This is a virtuoso debut and all the more enjoyable for including a just-about-recognisable Winchester running through its exhilarating pages. An engaging feature of the book is that the narrator grows up in a house "designed by Georgian midgets" which was the home of Harriet Smiles, Victorian poet. In reality, this was the house in College Street in which Jane Austen died. Julia Darling wrote a second novel (The Taxi Driver's Daughter, 2003) before her own tragically early death in Newcastle in 2005.

13 September 2009 from Friday Next

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