A Writer's Britain

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The highly acclaimed exploration of the way in which the British landscape is both represented and symbolized in British literature

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Nearly all British poets and novelists have had their roots in a particular region, described with varying degrees of love and intimacy. Some of them consciously identify themselves with this sense of place – Wordsworth with the Lakes, Hardy with Wessex, Crabbe with East Anglia. In others the association is more subtle. In this 'enormously evocative and rewarding anthology of the English genius loci' (in the words of Richard Holmes), Margaret Drabble, herself a star in the literary firmament, explores the part that this feeling for locality and landscape has played, often quite unobtrusively, and shows how pervasively it has fashioned some of the greatest works in the language.
Edition type: Gift edition
Extent: 288 pp
Format: hardback
Publication date: 2009-09-07
Size: 21.5 x 13.5 cm
ISBN: 9780500514931
Foreword • Sacred Places • The Pastoral Vision • Landscape as Art The Romantics • The Industrial Scene • The Golden Age • Maps
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Press Reviews

Drabble makes lively connections, parallels and distinctions … one of the great pleasures of the book is its quotations, generous in length, pertinently chosen … instructive and entertaining
The Spectator

An understanding of social history as deep as her knowledge of literature
The Times

A sensitive and, at times, moving survey of the relationship between place and writer
Contemporary Review


About the Author

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and the highly acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London and Somerset.

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