Thoughtlands: Walking in Writers’ Suffolk

Reviewed by Jeff Taylor

Jacky Colliss Harvey  (Haus Publishing Ltd: 2026)  

Suffolk has been waiting for far too long for a book such as Jacky Colliss Harvey’s Thoughtlands: Walking in Writers’ Suffolk, which treats the county’s rich literary heritage with such personal fondness. It was released on April 2^nd by Haus Publishing  The author is well known as a writer and editor. She is the author of the bestselling Red: A History of the Redhead (2015), The Animal’s Companion: People and their Pets, a 26,000-Year Love Story (2019) and Walking Pepys’s London (2021). Born in Suffolk the author was brought up partly in Kirton, a village not that far from Woodbridge where her mother had an antique shop. She now lives in London. 

To quote the book’s publicity, ‘Thoughtlands is part writer’s notebook and part memoir…a one-of-a-kind literary journey, and a unique exploration of the Suffolk Landscape’. It describes the author as ‘…tracing the connections between walking and writing both on the ground and within the psychogeography of a writer’s head.’ In the introduction  Harvey discusses the positive benefits of walking on physical and mental health, referring to Rebecca Solnit and by association her book Wanderlust: a History of Walking (Granta Edition: 2014). She also mentions Lauren Elkin who created the persona of the female leisurely walker in her book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto & Windus: 2016). In Thoughtlands the author lays claim to being a ‘…rambleuse, the woman who walks the countryside…’. 

The author details five circular walks in five separate chapters, tracing places where writers and poets lived and/or set their works. The walks are in the following order: Bury St Edmunds (Patron Saints), Lavenham (Into The Green), Woodbridge (Edward Fitzgerald), Dunwich (Heart Songs) and Aldeburgh (Ferric Affinities).  Although the author describes the book as being about ‘walkers who wrote, and writers who walk’, I didn’t feel that walking, with some exceptions, was the significant glue which joined the writers together. The main bond was their response to landscape, their attachment to place, not how they got from A to B.  

The book has a well thought out structure, including a section called The Writers which includes thumbnail sketches of ‘the most significant Suffolk writers featured’ starting with the well-known Adrian Bell and ending with the not so well-known James Edmund Vincent. There is also a very useful section which lists the books referred to in the text. In addition to her own Suffolk inspired reading, well-honed over many years, she notes that she also ‘found herself returning to two recent anthologies’ A Distant Cry (Black Dog Books, 2002) and A New Suffolk Garland (The Boydell Press, 2022). 

All in all, Thoughtlands is a book for those readers, like me, who think they know a good deal about Literary Suffolk but are always ready to find out more, and maybe get some exercise. It is also a book for those readers who don’t know a good deal but are keen to learn and also  get some exercise. 

The book can be bought via the publisher’s website or why  not try one of the many independent bookshops in the county or online. Thanks are due to Madeleine at Haus Publishing for providing an uncorrected proof copy of Thoughtlands: Walking in Writers’ Suffolk.

N. B. During the writing of this review I was saddened to hear of the death of Peter Tolhurst author and publisher of East Anglia A Literary Pilgrimage (Black Dog books: 1996). Although out of print it is worth chasing up a second-hand copy as a useful companion to Thoughtlands  and as a way of discovering other significant writers inspired by the rest of  Suffolk’s landscape.