Islands as Inspiration: Literary Landscapes that Captured the Imagination

Spetses – The Magus

In the early 1950s, young Oxford graduate John Fowles taught at the Anáryiros Koryalénos College on the Greek island of Spetses, which he didn’t much enjoy. The college – no longer a school but still used occasionally for cultural events – was run along Spartan lines, and Fowles used to escape its strictures by taking long walks across the island.

One day, out walking, he became lost. He followed the incongruous sound of the harmonium to correct his course and founded upon a stylish villa owned by Petros Botassi. The island and its brooding atmosphere gave Fowles the idea for a novel. In 1965, he published “The Magus”, with Botassi, renamed Maurice Conchis, as the leading character. It went on to become a best-seller in Britain and the US. Despite the book’s fame, it wasn’t translated into Greek until 1996, and Spetses remains refreshingly free of the literary tourism that often follows writers, although you can stay at Magus House on the south side of the island if you wish to follow in Fowles’ footsteps.

John Fowles: The Magus (Jonathan Cape, 1965)

Ischia – The Shield of Achilles

Capri may have the most glamorous reputation, but its larger neighbour across the Bay of Naples, the island of Ischia, has long appealed to writers and artists. In the late 1940s, film director Luchino Visconti bought a villa on the island, and before long, a fashionable crowd followed – everyone from Truman Capote and Maria Callas to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Poet WH Auden first visited in 1948 and rented a house in the seaside village of Forio, not far from Visconti’s house. Auden loved the verdant volcanic landscape, which inspired two poems in 1948, “Ischia” and “Pleasure Island”. From then until 1957, he spent most summers on Ischia, composing some of his finest verse, including “The Shield of Achilles”, the title poem in a collection that won America’s National Book Award for Poetry in 1956.

Sadly, the idyll ended the following year when his housekeeper, Giocondo, tried cashing a cheque from Auden for far more than the writer had in the bank. It may have been a forgery, or Auden may have mistakenly added another zero, but Giocondo publicly claimed the money was for services rendered.

Whatever the truth, Auden moved to Austria and never returned to Ischia again.

WH Auden: The Shield of Achilles (Faber & Faber, 1955)

Rhodes – Reflections on a Marine Venus

Few people have written about islands better – or more extensively – than Lawrence Durrell, who spent much of his peripatetic life living on one Mediterranean island or another. Born in India, he was educated in England, but he hated the country, and in 1935, at the age of 23, he managed to convince his new wife and his mother to move to Corfu, where they lived for the next five years (later commemorated in his brother Gerald Durrell’s best-selling memoir, My Family and Other Animals). Lawrence spent the war years in Cairo and Alexandria, where he worked as a press attaché to the British embassy, where he ended his first marriage and met Eve Cohen, the model for Justine in his best-known novel sequence, The Alexandria Quartet.

From 1945 to 1947, Durrell and Cohen lived in Rhodes New Town, in a tiny house at the entrance to the old Turkish cemetery, while he worked for the British Administration as a press attaché and censor. His lyrical account of his time on the island, “Reflections on a Marine Venus”, was published in 1953 and casts its net widely across the present and the past, for Rhodes has a long and beguiling history.

Lawrence Durrell: Reflections on a Marine Venus (Faber & Faber, 1953)

Sicily – The Leopard

For many visitors – and some Sicilians – the essence of this extraordinary island is summed up in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), published in Italy in 1958 and turned into a famously opulent film by Luchino Visconti in 1963, starring Burt Reynolds, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale. Set in the late 19th century and based on stories from the time of Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, Prince Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, “The Leopard” was his only novel.

An intensely nostalgic portrait of a feudal aristocracy in terminal decline, it became the best-selling work of 20th-century Italian fiction. Still, it was rejected by the two publishers that Lampedusa sent it to, and he never saw its success, dying in 1957 at the age of 60. He wrote it between 1954 and 1956, prompted by what seemed to the author to be the final destruction of the old world by the Second World War, which saw the Lampedusa palace reduced to rubble. By a further twist of fate, the Palazzo Filangeri di Cutò in the little town of Santa Margherita di Belice, where much of the novel is set, was almost completely destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1968. Part of it has since been rebuilt and contains a small Lampedusa Museum.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa: The Leopard (Collins Harvill, 1960)

Patmos – Book of Revelation

Patmos has become incredibly chic in the past decade or two, one of the most northerly islands in the Dodecanese, but it wasn’t always considered such an attractive location. During Roman times, it was somewhere to send unruly citizens; tradition says that among those exiled here, most likely under Emperor Domitian in the late first century AD, was a Christian divine called John, who passed at least some of his time here writing the “Book of Revelation”, the last book in the New Testament which is also simply known as Revelation or The Apocalypse.

The gloomy cave in which he is said to have lived and dreamed of the Whore of Babylon and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse can still be seen on the hillside between the 19th-century port of Skala and Horá, the medieval main town, but the island’s real glory is the fortified Monastery of St John the Theologian, founded in 1088. Its exterior is forbidding, but its thick walls were proof against centuries of pirate attacks and raiding parties, and its uninterrupted history of worship, its ancient library and its compelling architecture helped it gain UNESCO World Heritage status in 1999.

St John the Divine: Book of Revelation (cAD90)