Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A lively look at the English literary and artistic responses to the weather from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Keats and Ian McEwan
In a sweeping panorama, Weatherland allows us to witness England’s cultural climates across the centuries. Before the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxons living in a wintry world wrote about the coldness of exile or the shelters they had to defend against enemies outside. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossoms and cuckoos. Descriptions of a rainy night are rare before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics had adopted the squall as a fit subject for their most probing thoughts.
The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, and Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a twelfth-century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1684, and the Sunspan house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. “Bloody cold,” says Jonathan Swift in the “slobbery” January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one. Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life story of those who have lived in it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harris follows up Romantic Moderns, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, with this edifying and rigorous tour of English literature and painting in terms of its depiction of weather. The premise may initially seem quirky and slight, but the author is a brilliant guide and makes a persuasive case for examining how art looks at the skies. She takes readers through the frozen world of early Anglo-Saxon poetry, Shakespeare's tales of winter and midsummer, and the contrast between Jane Austen's characters, who hide indoors from the weather, and Emily Bront 's, who wander out onto the moors to experience it. Throughout, Harris proves a scrupulously close reader of prose and poetry, with an equally insightful eye for paintings. But this is no mere stuffy lit-crit slog: the narrowness of subject affords a deliciously broad scope for mining the rich depths of English letters and art, scientific development, cultural history, religion, and philosophy. The sumptuous reproductions of artworks are worth the price of admission all by themselves. With her keen eye for detail and astonishing ability to trace connections, Harris will change how readers view their relationships to art and the world around them.
