George Eliot: Arbury Hall, WarwickshireBorn Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot grew up close to Arbury Hall, where her father was employed as land agent. It provided her with a rich seam of material which she exploited in three Warwickshire stories, Scenes of Clerical Life. Later novels also drew on life at Arbury. Eliot was intrigued by the history of the house and its Gothic remodelling, which took more than 50 years to complete. As a child, she would accompany her father to the hall, where she had free run of the rooms and browsed in the library.

Dylan Thomas: The Boat House, CarmarthenshireThomas moved to the Boat House at Laugharne, 40 miles west of Swansea, in 1949. It was the house of which the poet and his wife always dreamed. The view from his writing shed – a ‘water and tree room on the cliff’ – inspired many of his poems. Here he would observe the eternal cycle of the tide and the variable, often dramatic, weather conditions of the estuary. Visitors find the cluttered study strewn with books, cigarette packets and discarded notes, just as it was when Thomas was working.

Jane Austen: Chawton House, HampshireChawton was the family home of Jane Austen in the early part of the 19th century. Today, the house is a museum, retaining the air and atmosphere of a modest country home. While at Chawton, Jane prepared breakfast in the dining room every day at about 9am. She worked at a three-legged table in the parlour, which is where she made revisions to Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice before publication. Sometimes she would be struck by a thought or an idea and would rush from the room to her writing desk.

Frances Hodgson Burnett:Great Maytham Hall, Kent
One day, while in the garden at Great Maytham Hall, Frances Hodgson Burnett was distracted by a solitary robin, leading her to discover a door concealed by ivy in one of the mellow brick walls. On the other side lay an overgrown 18th-century garden, which she transformed. Hodgson Burnett’s stroke of good fortune inspired her most enduring work, The Secret Garden, which was published in 1911.

Agatha Christie: Greenway, DevonOverlooking a glorious sweep of the River Dart in Devon, Greenway once belonged to Agatha Christie. The Grade II-listed Georgian house makes an appearance in several of her novels and was the setting for one of Christie’s pre-publication rituals. The Queen of Crime would read a chapter from her new whodunnit to her family and ask if they could unmask the killer. Often, Christie’s husband, Max Mallowan, would wake from his evening slumber and correctly identify the murderer.

Photograph: PA/PA

John Keats: Keats house, LondonKeats rented Wentworth Place (now known as Keats House) in Hampstead, for £5 a month (about £250 today), plus half the liquor bill. His life changed immeasurably in 1819 when Mrs Brawne, a widow, and her three children moved in next door. Eighteen-year-old Fanny captured the poet’s heart from the moment he met her. The parlour now holds bookcases filled with publications known to have been in Keats’s library.

Henry James and EF Benson:Lamb House, East Sussex
Henry James first saw Lamb House, situated in the picturesque East Sussex Cinque Port of Rye, in a watercolour belonging to an architect friend. Over subsequent summers, James could be found ‘casting sheep’s eyes at Lamb House’. In 1898 he discovered that the owner had died and Lamb House was available to rent. He wasted no time in purchasing the lease ‘on quite deliciously moderate terms’. Lamb House later became the home of EF Benson, whose Mapp and Lucia was adapted for television by the BBC in 2014.

Lord Byron: Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire
Overlooking lakes, gardens and 300 acres of parkland, Newstead Abbey was almost in ruins when Byron inherited the estate at the age of ten. In addition to hosting wild parties, he indulged in pistol practice in the Great Hall, boxed in the drawing room and allowed a tame bear and a wolf to roam the corridors.

Lucy M Boston:The Manor, Heminford Grey, Cambridgeshire
Continuously occupied for nearly 900 years, this is one of England’s oldest houses, with thick stone walls and Norman features. Just weeks before the outbreak of the second world war, the manor became the home of the writer Lucy M Boston who imagined the wonderful old house and its garden as the backdrop to herGreene Knowe stories for children, published between 1954 and 1961.

The Brontë sisters:The Parsonage, West Yorkshire
‘Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth,’ wrote Virginia Woolf after a visit to the home of the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. ‘They fit like a snail to its shell.’ One of the first things visitors see is the dining room, which was also a parlour where family members gathered and where the Brontë sisters fleshed out their novels, endlessly circling the table and reading extracts aloud to each other. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were written here.