Inside Jerome K Jerome’s nine-bedroom Oxfordshire house

Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat – a tale of three hapless, hypochondriac London clerks who take a trip along the River Thames in the hope of curing their ailments – became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1889, and hasn’t been out of print since. Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson all owe it to Jerome. 

The book’s success meant that in 1895, Walsall-born Jerome (then in his mid thirties) could make a move to a rambling Oxfordshire house, built in the 1820s on the site of an ancient monastery. 

Although he clearly had a fondness for the Thames, the home he chose wasn’t quite on the waterfront. It was, however, in a glorious rural spot in the village of Ewelme, part of what is now the Chiltern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. 

In his 1926 memoir, My Life and Times, he wrote movingly of the home, known then as Gould’s Grove and today as Troy, and which he and Ettie shared with their daughter, Rowena, and his stepdaughter, Elsie.