10 Author House Museums: From Shakespeare's Birthplace to Neruda's Isla Negra

Key facts

• Shakespeare's Birthplace is in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and is managed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
• The Charles Dickens Museum is at 48 Doughty Street, London, the only surviving London home of Dickens, where he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.
• The Jane Austen Center in Bath hosts an annual Jane Austen Festival each September, holding a Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people in Regency costume.
• The Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, has nearly 60 cats, about half of which are polydactyl, descendants of a cat named Snow White.
• The Leo Tolstoy Estate Museum at Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, preserves Tolstoy's study and personal library of around 22,000 books.
• The Franz Kafka Museum in Prague is divided into the Existential Space and the Imaginary Topography.
• The Victor Hugo House in Paris is a municipal museum in the Hôtel de Rohan-Guémené, with admission temporarily paid through November 22, 2026.
• The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, was designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter and decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany's firm.
• The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth holds the world's largest collection of Brontë artifacts.
• Pablo Neruda's Isla Negra house in Chile was built from 1937 onward and features collections of ship figureheads and nautical maps.
• La Chascona, another Neruda house in Santiago, contains a portrait of Matilde Urrutia by Diego Rivera with Neruda's face hidden in her hair.