Lyme Regis in Literature: Austen, Fowles, and the Town That Writers Return To

Few towns of its size have attracted as many writers as Lyme Regis. For over two hundred years the harbour, the cliffs, and the Cobb have provided backdrops for fiction that has endured long after the authors left. A guide to the town’s remarkable place in English literature.

There is something about Lyme Regis that resists easy description and therefore invites it. The town sits at the foot of unstable cliffs, its streets falling steeply to a harbour that has been there since the thirteenth century. The Cobb, the great curved harbour wall that shelters the bay, is visible from almost every approach to the town and gives it a silhouette that is unlike any other small port in England. Writers who visit often find that it lodges in the imagination in ways that demand to be put on the page.

The roll call is a long one. Jane Austen came in 1803 and 1804 and set a crucial sequence of her final completed novel here. John Fowles lived in the town for most of the second half of his life and used it as the setting for a novel that remains one of the most discussed English fictions of the twentieth century. The marine biologist and essayist J.G. Millais wrote about the bay. The poet Edward Thomas walked the cliffs above it. The connection between the town and the written word runs deep and has not diminished.

Jane Austen and Persuasion

Jane Austen visited Lyme Regis in September 1803 with her parents and sister, staying in lodgings in the town and spending time on the beach and the Cobb. A second visit followed in autumn 1804. The landscape and atmosphere of the town stayed with her, and when she came to write Persuasion — composed between 1815 and 1816, less than a year before her death, and published posthumously in 1817 — she set some of its most memorable scenes there.

The novel follows Anne Elliot, a woman of quiet intelligence who was persuaded seven years earlier to break off her engagement to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, and who encounters him again when circumstances bring them together. The Lyme Regis sequences occur roughly halfway through the novel, when the party visits the town and walks on the Cobb. It is there that the impulsive Louisa Musgrove jumps from the steps of the upper Cobb, falls, and is knocked unconscious, an accident that reshapes the relationships among all the main characters.

Austen’s description of Lyme is specific and affectionate. She mentions the beach, the Cobb, the walk below the cliffs, and the general atmosphere of a seaside town in the early nineteenth century. The passage in which she describes the Cobb itself — “the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are worthy of any devotion in the numbers who haunt them” — remains one of the most quoted descriptions of the place in any language. Visitors who know the novel often find that the harbour and the Cobb steps look exactly as they expected them to look, which is a tribute both to Austen’s accuracy and to how little the core of the town has changed.

John Fowles and The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles arrived in Lyme Regis in 1965 and stayed. He lived in Belmont House, a Georgian house above the town, for more than four decades, and Lyme provided the setting for his most celebrated novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published in 1969. The book is set in Lyme in 1867, though Fowles’s narrative technique is deliberately anachronistic, with the narrator interrupting the Victorian story to address readers from the vantage point of the 1960s and offering alternative endings. It won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in 1981, with much of the location filming done on the Cobb and in the town itself.

The novel opens with one of the most famous images in modern English fiction: a woman standing alone on the end of the Cobb, staring out to sea, her back to the town. This figure — Sarah Woodruff, the “French Lieutenant’s woman” of the title — is an outsider in the tight social world of mid-Victorian Lyme, and the Cobb, exposed and liminal, is the perfect setting for her. Fowles uses the town’s geography with considerable care throughout the novel, and readers familiar with Lyme will recognise specific locations in the text.

Fowles also served as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum for several years and was deeply interested in the town’s history, including the life and work of Mary Anning, whose story he considered writing about. His presence in the town was a significant cultural fact for decades, and he is credited with helping to draw attention to the literary heritage of the area. He died in 2005 and is buried in the churchyard at Lyme Regis.

Other writers and the town

The literary connections extend well beyond the two most famous names. The diarist and poet Francis Kilvert visited in 1874 and wrote about the town and the beach in his diary with the same close observational attention he brought to everything. Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, is thought to have connections to the area, though the evidence is less direct. The Romantic poet Alfred Lord Tennyson stayed in Lyme in 1867, the same year in which Fowles set his novel, and wrote in a letter that the town was among the finest he had visited.

The novelist Tracy Chevalier, best known for Girl with a Pearl Earring, set her 2009 novel Remarkable Creatures in Lyme Regis, drawing on the life of Mary Anning and her friendship with the amateur fossil collector Elizabeth Philpot. The novel brings the early nineteenth-century town to life with considerable historical care and has introduced many readers to Anning’s story who might not otherwise have encountered it. It is still widely available in local bookshops.

Visiting the literary town

The Lyme Regis Museum, which sits on the site of the Anning family home at the eastern end of the town, holds material related to both the town’s literary and its natural history. The museum runs occasional literary events and is a good starting point for anyone interested in the town’s cultural connections. The local bookshop, Bay Books on Broad Street, stocks a well-chosen selection of books connected to Lyme and the surrounding area, including editions of all the novels mentioned here.

The Cobb itself is freely accessible at all times, and walking its full length — including, if conditions allow, the upper level from which Louisa Musgrove fell — gives a direct physical connection to two centuries of literary imagination. The view from the seaward end back towards the town, with the cliffs rising behind and the Georgian terraces stacked on the hillside, is the view that Austen, Fowles, and dozens of others looked back at and turned into words. It repays the short walk to reach it.

For a town of fewer than four thousand permanent residents, Lyme Regis has an unusually rich relationship with the literature of the last two centuries. It is a place that seems to generate stories: the cliffs fall and reveal new fossils; the harbour has weathered storms for seven hundred years; and the Cobb stands at the edge of the sea, waiting for the next writer who needs it.