Literary tourism continues to draw readers and travelers to places inspired by famous novels, from the Brontës’ Haworth to Jane Austen’s Bath and Thomas Hardy’s Dorset. These locations, often linked to classic literature, have become popular destinations, especially with the rise of social media trends that turn books into travel itineraries. However, the places literary tourists visit may not be exactly as they imagine them to be. The physical locations of Haworth, Bath, and Dorset do exist, but the Brontë moors, Austen’s Bath, and Hardy’s Wessex are literary reimaginings of those places. These reimaginings may not match readers’ expectations precisely. Literary geography, a field that combines physical geography with literary studies, began in the late 19th century as novels gained popularity and literary tourism grew. In 1899, William Lyon Phelps created a Literary Map of England, marking locations tied to authors and their works. A few years later, William Sharp’s Literary Geography (1904) mapped regions like “Dickens land” and “the Brontë country.” These early maps helped readers see where fictional and real worlds overlapped. Today, readers still seek these intersections. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, for example, is a fictional landscape that blends real and imagined places in southern England. Readers often treat it as real, even leading to guidebooks about its literary landmarks during Hardy’s lifetime. Hardy himself worried that readers were taking his invented landscape too literally. The novelist V.S. Naipaul once reflected on how readers can create imaginary places from books. Reading Dickens as a child in Trinidad, Naipaul described how Dickens built a “city of fantasy” that readers could reconstruct using their existing knowledge. This insight challenges the idea that realism is purely about accuracy. Dickens’s London wasn’t just a detailed description of the real city; it was a space open enough for readers to imagine their own version of it. When visitors arrive at places like Haworth, Grasmere, or Dorset, they are not encountering these places for the first time. They have already visited them in their imagination, shaped by books, films, and other cultural influences. This imagined version is often more vivid than the actual place. The emotional experience of comparing the real location to the imagined one can be described as “anemoia,” a term coined by writer John Koenig to describe nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. In this case, it becomes a longing for a place never personally experienced. Many literary destinations, like authors’ houses, aim to connect readers with the origins of famous works. These sites often blend biography with fiction, making it difficult to separate the real from the imagined. At the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, for example, visitors walk through domestic spaces while also engaging with the imaginative worlds of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Similarly, Jane Austen’s house in Chawton offers a chance to feel closer to the author and her novels. Some sites even give geographical form to places that never existed, like Sherlock Holmes’s fictional 221B Baker Street, which now has a real museum. In this way, literary tourism becomes a process of imagination as much as exploration.