Writers and artists across the centuries, looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk wind, have felt very different things. Weatherland watches cultural climates on the move and tells a history of English literature in terms of light and air.
The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately. Alexandra Harris pauses over small, evocative details as well as trying to sketch in a panorama. 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 celebrates English air and the writers who have lived in it.
‘A dazzling journey through the weather-worlds of English culture and history’ Robert Macfarlane
