Village rectories, the traditional family homes of church ministers, have had a long association with writers in Britain.

The stories from the rectory are often heart-warming and fit the image of a golden age, but Deborah Alun-Jones reveals that the serene exterior often belied the tensions within that have produced some of the greatest writers and poets in the English language.

For many, the archetypal Georgian rectory nestling beside an ancient church evokes a scene from Jane Austen. For others it conjures up something much darker and elemental, such as the parsonage on the Yorkshire Moors where the Brunt sisters led such confined yet creative lives.

The story is sometimes one of overcoming adversity, whether it was exile in a Yorkshire rectory for the essayist Sydney Smith in the 1800s; struggling with a melancholic father for Tennyson; or seeking his vocation in the Welsh hills for the poet-rector R. S. Thomas.

More recently it has been a question of entering a world where literary voices still resound, such as Vikram Seth at the Old Rectory near Salisbury, where George Herbert lived, or Edmund de Waal growing up in the Chancery at Lincoln, home to the prodigiously creative Benson family a century earlier.