Martha Lackland dies in 1905. Her great-niece, Letty attends the funeral. Here she meets Luke O'Hare, an aspiring actor with plans to start a theatre for the poor of London. Letty falls under the spell of Luke and his circle of Bohemian friends. In an attempt to establish her independence from her domineering family she runs away to help Luke and his friends set up the theatre. It is also a time of great change for women as the Suffragette movement presents a radical challenge to the established order and Letty is drawn to the excitement and liberation it promises.

This is the first full-length study of literary tourism in North America as well as Britain, and a unique exploration of popular response to writers, literary house museums, and the landscapes or "countries " associated with their lives and works. An interdisciplinary study ranging from 1820-1940, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries unites museum and tourism studies, book history, narrative theory, theories of gender, space, and things, and other approaches to depict and interpret the haunting experiences of exhibited houses and the curious history of topo-biographical writing about famous authors. In illustrated chapters that blend Victorian and recent first-person encounters that range from literary shrines and plaques to guidebooks, memoirs, portraits, and monuments, Alison Booth discusses pilgrims such as William and Mary Howitt, Anna Maria and Samuel Hall, and Elbert Hubbard, and magnetic hosts and guests as Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Martineau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, James, and Dickens. Virginia Woolf's feminist response to homes and haunts shapes a chapter on Mary Russell Mitford, Gaskell, and the Brontës, and another on the Carlyles' house and Monk's House. Booth rediscovers collections of personalities, haunted shrines, and imaginative re-enactments that have been submerged by a century of academic literary criticism.

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