In the summer of 1847, at the age of sixteen, the poetess holidayed here with her parents. Thirty years later, she visited Herne Bay lending library to find reading material to distract her bored and depressed brother, the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, convalescing in the care of his sister and mother at nearby Hunters Forstal.
The poetess spent five weeks in Westcliff Bungalow at Birchington, ‘a large, one-storeyed commodious residence‘,where she, her mother and a number of friends cared for her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his final illness...