Lecture series Literary escapes to the south of France

Follow in the footsteps of the Scottish writer and consumptive Robert Louis Stevenson, who moved to sunny Hyères on doctor’s orders in the late 1800s, and the English writers who came after him, from W Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene to Anthony Burgess – each escaping their own problems back home.

Once on the Côte d’Azur, each began remarkably different lives, with Maugham in a Moorish villa constantly filled with literati, Greene in a solitary one-bedroom apartment, and Burgess in the tax haven of Monaco – yet all were inspired to write some of their most famous works while living there.

Learn about the many writers from Europe and New Zealand who retreated to the Côte d’Azur in the late 1800s and early 1900s, drawn by promises of sunny weather and political freedoms.

Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield and Friedrich Nietzsche fled to its warmer winter climate in the hopes of treating their illnesses. Others, including Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Nikos Kazantzakis, fled in self-imposed political exile. Fittingly, 50 years after Mansfield’s move to Menton on the French Riviera, another New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, would spend six months there as a Katherine Mansfield Fellow.

Meet the American writers who moved to the Côte d’Azur after World War One. Led by Bostonian philanthropists the Murphys, these American ‘invaders’ almost immediately transformed the coast from a winter haven into a summer resort.

Among these new freedom seekers was the wealthy Pulitzer Prize–winner Edith Wharton and, most famously, F Scott Fitzgerald, who chronicled the Murphy crowd’s liberal lifestyle in Tender is the night. Fifty years later, James Baldwin would escape to Saint Paul de Vence where, disillusioned with American racial prejudice, he would write the unfinished Remember this house.