Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies

by Alexandra Harris

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780500773185
Publisher:	Thames & Hudson
Publication date:	02/02/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	35 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alexandra Harris is a cultural historian and writer. She is the recipient of the Guardian First Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award for Romantic Moderns. She is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford and Liverpool.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Mirror in the Sky 7

Tesserae 18

I

The Winter-Wise 26

Forms of Mastery 35

Imported Elements 40

Weathervane 46

II

'Whan that Aprill…' 51

Month by Month 60

Secrets and Signs 72

A Holly Branch 78

'Why fares the world thus?' 81

III

Splendour and Artifice 87

Shakespeare: Inside-Out 101

IV

Two Anatomists 117

Sky and Bones 123

Milton's Temperature 139

A Pause: On Freezeland Street 146

V

Method and Measurement 161

Reasoning with Mud 175

A Language for the Breeze 182

Dr Johnson Withstands the Weather 196

Day by Day 204

VI

Coleridge and the Storm 219

Wordsworth: Weather's Friend 228

A Flight: In Cloudland 234

VII

Shelley on Air 249

The Stillness of Keats 255

Clare's Calendar 265

Turner and the Sun 268

VIII

Companions of the Sky 279

'Drip, drip, drip' 291

Varieties of Gloom 302

Ruskin in the Age of Umber 315

Rain on a Grave 321

IX

Bright New World 329

Greyscale 350

Too Much Weather 372

Flood 390

Sources of Epigraphs and Notes 394

Select Bibliography 419

Acknowledgments 424

Sources of Illustrations 426

Index 428

Editorial Reviews

…fascinating…an ambitious, sweeping survey of British art and literature as seen through the lens of clouds, skies, sunshine and drizzle…Carrying her immense knowledge lightly, never emerging as didactic or pedantic, [Harris] takes us across sodden fields and frosty meadows, through thick mist—and into the English mind…She's a nonpareil guide, and Weatherland is a great achievement, wide-ranging but not confusing, packed with details yet clearly focused. With more than 60 well-integrated illustrations, the book is also beautifully produced.

The New York Times Book Review - Andrea Wulf

11/23/2015
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 Brontë’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. Agent: Caroline Dawnay, United Agents (U.K.). (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"[The book] is beautifully produced, with scores of crisp, evocative illustrations.… her commentary… is unfailingly brilliant and revealing….an utterly superb, enchanting work"

Choice

"Fascinating… An ambitious, sweeping survey of British art and literature as seen through the lens of clouds, skies, sunshine and drizzle. Carrying her immense knowledge lightly, never emerging as didactic or pedantic, [Alexandra Harris] takes us across sodden fields and frosty meadows, through thick mist—and into the English mind. Harris collects examples everywhere—from plays and architecture, from poems and elegies and paintings, but also from diaries and letters. She’s a nonpareil guide and Weatherland is a great achievement, wide-ranging but not confusing, packed with details yet clearly focused [and] with more than 60 well-integrated illustrations the book is also beautifully produced."

The New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating…. Harris traces the way we describe the weather because those descriptions become our metaphors: sunny gloomy, cloudy, cold, bitter—a lexicon that is as much about ourselves as it is the weather we inhabit"

Art Desk

"My thinking about people and weather has been inspired from the first by Virginia Woolf,” writes Harris, whose Romantic Moderns won the Guardian First Book Award in 2010. In Weatherland, Harris captures the moods and influence of weather from Roman Britain to today’s climate change in lyrical prose that slides easily from historic moments to 21st Century insights. She gives us Tacitus, writing “the climate is foul, with frequent rains and mists,” and Beowulf’s “wild weather”. She traces the influence and revelations of weather through the work of artists and writers like Daniel Defoe, “cataloguer of the storm-strewn world”, who wrote his first book about a devastating 1703 hurricane, and Charlotte Brontë, who “breathed the lightning of Wuthering Heights with a sense of awe”. Weatherland is swift moving and brilliantly written."

BBC.com