Mapped
Bruges-la-Morte
Georges Rodenbach
A widower, Hugues Viane, comes to Bruges to mourn his dead wife, keeping a plait of her hair as a relic, until he grows obsessed with a dancer who is her living double, and the silent 'dead city' becomes the mirror of his grief. Rodenbach makes the real Bruges a character: the still canals and their reflections, the great churches and their bells, the hushed enclosure of the Béguinage, and the belfry above the market square where the Procession of the Holy Blood ends the book in murder.
5 places →
Villette
Charlotte Brontë
Brussels, thinly disguised as Villette in the kingdom of Labassecour. Brontë mapped her own two years teaching at the Pensionnat Heger on the Rue d'Isabelle into it: the boarding school, the old Flemish streets, the park across the way, the cathedral where she once made confession. It brings Belgium into the atlas.
6 places →