A love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman; it has not only inspired native-born writers, but also such distinguished expatriates as Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. Yet this is perhaps the first book not only to present an image of the country as seen by writers of different regions and period,s but also to illuminate the way in which their work has changed our visual attitudes, our taste in landscape, and our relation to nature. With a perceptive and brilliant text by the distinguished novelist and critic Margaret Drabble, and a wide range of specially commissioned photographs in colour and black and white, A Writer's Britain covers all varieties of the rural and urban landscape.
Beginning with the country's sacred places, from St Cuthbert's Lindisfarne to T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, the author moves on tot he pastoral Britain of farms and shepherds, emphasizing both the rich abundance presented by Shakespeare and the grim hardship depicted by working-class poets such as John Clare. The eighteenth-century art of landscape, as practised by Kent and Brown, and described by Pope, Walpole and Thomson, is her next theme, leading on to the Romantic movement with its passion for the genuinely wild and grand. She shows that the idea of nature as a potent spiritual force profoundly affected writers of that period, as can be clearly seen in the portrayal of the Lake District by Wordsworth, in that of the Border country by Scott, and, by direct descent, in the Yorkshire Fells of the Brontes and in the Wessex of Thomas Hardy. Following this is a section on the industrial landscape as seen, often with disgust, through the eyes of writers from Dickens to Lawrence, Arnold Bennett and Orwell.
Finally the book closes on the theme of the modern rural idyll, with special reference to Laurie Lee's Gloucestershire and Dylan Thomas's Wales.
About the author
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939, and attended the Mount School, York, a Quaker boarding-school.
She was awarded a Major Scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English and received a double first.
In addition to her distinguished novels, which include The Millstone (1965, filmed as A Touch of Love, 1969),
The Waterfall (1969), The Realms of Gold (1975) and The Ice Age (1977),
she has written a definitive biography of Arnold Bennett (1975) and a critical study of Wordsworth,
and was the editor of The Genius of Thomas Hardy (1976).
About the photographer
Jorge Lewinski was born in Poland and came to this country during the Second World War.
A Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, he becomes a professional photographer in 1965
and is now Senior Lecturer in Photography and the History of Art at the London College of Printing.
He has had a number of one-man exhibitions, including on at the National Portrait Gallery,
and has provided photographs for numerous magazines and journals, as well as for books.
He is the author of A Dictionary of Photographic Terms and Techniques (1977).
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