Spirit of place

A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature, by Margaret Drabble

This is a book about the inner landscapes of writers, or the ones they inhabited when young, and how these informed their work and affected their readers. In the process of describing these, Margaret Drabble makes lively connections, parallels and distinctions. The languor and melancholy of Tennyson’s poetry, for example, which so surprisingly suited the Victorian mood, derives from the Lincolnshire of his youth — ‘Gray sand banks and pale sunsets — dreary wind/ Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea!’ — whereas Dickens (‘the least enervating of writers’) loathed Lincolnshire, and in Bleak House puts Sir Mortimer Dedlock’s country house there and enjoys describing it ‘with a dreariness that rivals Tennyson’s’. Drabble quotes this passage at length; and part of the last sentence is suggestive enough: ‘On Sundays the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks into a cold sweat.