Starlight Wood

Walking back to the Romantic Countryside

Fiona Sampson

$49.99

Hardback

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English

Corsair
20 December 2022

Art & design styles: Romanticism; Memoirs; Walking, hiking, trekking

'A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

We think we know the Romantic countryside: that series of picturesque landscapes familiar from paintings, poems and music that are still part of Britain's idea of itself today.

But for the Romantics themselves, the countryside was a place where radical change was underway both within and around them. 'Romanticism isn't a cultural artefact; it's a way for thought to move,' writes highly acclaimed biographer and poet Fiona Sampson in this transporting and vividly evocative book, in which she spends a year walking in the Romantics' footsteps, from Kent to Kintyre. Setting out across ten landscapes, as the Romantics once did as they wrote, travelled, settled, or tried to define the rural environment, Fiona Sampson walks not with a sense of nostalgic cliche, but radically alive to interaction between the human and the natural world.

So how were poets, writers, artists and philosophers of the time shaped by their natural environment? And how can we return to the vividness with which they experienced it? Starlight Wood is part group biography, part cultural history, and part an essay about place. In it, we find Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning using diet as a symbol of radicalism, and John Constable revealing the emptiness of the post-Enclosure British countryside; while the young William Wordsworth follows the ideal of radical sensibility into the heart of Revolutionary France, and the biggest military structure in Britain since Hadrian's Wall is engineered on Romney Marsh to keep Napoleon at bay.

Moving intuitively between art, politics, agriculture, science and philosophy, and punctuated by the author's personal reflections - most movingly on the death during the pandemic of her artist father, whose line-and-wash drawings act as gateways through which we embark on each walk - Starlight Wood brilliantly examines the importance of the countryside in shaping Romantic attitudes, and offers a gripping insight into the lives of some of the most influential figures of the age.

By: Fiona Sampson
Imprint: Corsair
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 218mm, Width: 142mm, Spine: 36mm
Weight: 500g
ISBN: 9781472156020
ISBN 10: 1472156021
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 20 December 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Professor Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet published in thirty-eight languages. Come Down (2020) was awarded the Naim Frasheri Laureateship, the European Lyric Atlas Prize and Wales Poetry Book of the Year. A biographer and critic, librettist and literary translator, her In Search of Mary Shelley was internationally acclaimed, and Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2021) was a New York Times Editors' Choice and Washington Post Book of the Year, a Sunday Times Paperback of the Year, and finalist for the Plutarch Prize and the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

Reviews for Starlight Wood: Walking back to the Romantic Countryside

A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue... Accompany Sampson on her varied rambles you'll find your eyes opened anew to the beauty not only of nature, but also of creative engagement with every aspect of the world * Mail on Sunday *