France, literature and the pull of culture

Think for a moment of your dream house … is it in England? or maybe abroad?

Well, there’s a good chance it’s in France, especially if you’re a culture vulture, according to Professor Catherine Cole in her memoir-cum-research book on the world’s most popular tourist destination.

Catherine, a homeowner herself, is hooked on France and she’s not the only one – with tens of thousands of Brits each year seeking holiday homes in its abundance of rural idylls.

In her new book- A French House: On the Love of Place - the creative writing professor sets out to explore the reasons she was drawn to France and navigate how an ex-pat lifestyle in the Dordogne or Provence is forged by culture and fuelled by our imagination.

“According to one survey I came across, French holiday home ownership among Brits is influenced by the pursuit of a rural lifestyle (25%) the weather (20%), house prices (16%), food and wine (4.5%) and the safety of French communities (3.5%).

“But it is the love of French culture at (31%) which most strongly draws people there,” says Catherine.

It can be love at first sight, she suggests, citing travel writer, Alastair Sawday who recounts; “Burgundian villages, Norman farms, cycling in the Vosges, the chateaux of the Dordogne, walking in the Luberon. I was hooked.”

The most profound journeys are not always the most dramatic

Author Catherine Cole, Professor of Creative Writing, LJMU

A strong theme in the book is this passion for French culture and how foreigners acquire it through literature, films, music, food, wine and history.  

“An entry into French culture can be through a range of portals such as French film festivals, wine fairs and restaurants. “For me, it was a childhood of Madeline books, then Colette, Balzac, Zola, Hugo, Gide, Duras and de Beauvoir.”

Catherine recalls that these cultural aspirations came together during a holiday, decades later, when she decided to bite the bullet and finally make her dreams of a French house a reality.

Fascinatingly all the books she’d read and the films she’d seen had already built the house in her imagination. “It had to have a specific aesthetic,” she says. “Flagging, beams, a massive fireplace; ‘granny chic’, I called it. It had to feel as though it had been in the family for years and that a grandmother has just left it full of clutter and curiosities.

“You see it in the films of Rohmer or Ozon - a family arrives at their summerhouse, throws back the shutters, pulls the dust covers off the furniture, sets up the table under the apple trees and spreads a white tablecloth on it as deftly as a cook throws a sheet of marzipan over a cake,” she writes.

Catherine’s latest memoir quietly subverts the conventions of expatriate literature, neither tale of escapism nor of comic cultural misunderstanding, it is she says “a meditation … on the ways in which place, long dreamed of, becomes a site of emotional and intellectual transformation.”

She adds: “The most profound journeys are not always the most dramatic. Sometimes, the most transformative acts are those of quiet imagination.”