The Gilded Chalet

'With a sharp eye for detail and a historian's capacious knowledge, Padraig Rooney has written a superbly amusing guide to all the writers who've been drawn to or emerged from Switzerland. This is a book that should be stuffed into every stocking - the perfect Christmas gift!' -Edmund White, author of The Flaneur Rainy summer of 1816. Paparazzi train their telescopes across Lake Geneva on the hanky-panky of Byron, Shelley and their womenfolk. Mary Shelley is inspired to write Frankenstein . Byron diets and dashes off The Prisoner of Chillon while his doctor, 'Pollydolly', gives birth to The Vampyre . Percy Shelley almost drowns in the lake. Together they put Switzerland on the literary map. From Caesar, Rousseau and the Romantics, from Conan Doyle to le Carre, Hesse and Highsmith writers have scratched their names on the Swiss chalet. In the nineteenth century they came for fresh air, fresh milk and the sublime scenery, escaping tuberculosis and smog.^ Switzerland became spa central, a place of health fads, luxury hotels and nude sunbathing. Sherlock Holmes fell to his death only to be resurrected. H. G. Wells thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Hermann Hesse had himself buried t