Review by Choice Review
This book will likely change hands many times this year in the form of birthday and holiday presents. It is beautifully produced, with scores of crisp, evocative illustrations (most in color), and (more important) it is beautifully written by a scholar who has thought long and fruitfully about her subject, so even when treating well-known authors, she offers remarkable flashes of insight. Along with her own words, Harris (Univ. of Liverpool, UK) includes translations or paraphrases of difficult older passages, so anyone can follow her commentary. The book has no overarching argument, but no matter. It is a work to savor in small increments--even a 40-page chapter is too rich a feast for one sitting. Harris begins with the treatment of winter in Old English works such as Beowulf and The Wanderer, and her commentary (enriched by quotations from less-known works, e.g., Old English riddles) is unfailingly brilliant and revealing. So too is her chapter on Chaucer and many much less familiar Middle English authors who celebrate spring, though until 1500, that season had no name (other than Lent) in English. On to the present. Harris has produced an utterly superb, enchanting work that will appeal to anyone who cares about England or its literature. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Douglas Lane Patey, Smith College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S novel "Orlando," every century of the title character's long life is marked by distinctively different weather and changes in the air. The days and seasons of the Elizabethan age are full of sharp contrasts (it's either hot or cold, bright or dark), while for the Victorians the light and sun of the 18th century turn damp, moist and shadowy. "All was darkness," Orlando observes at the stroke of midnight on the last day of 1799, "the 19th century had begun." Woolf's astute differentiation and observation were the inspiration for Alexandra Harris's fascinating new book, "Weatherland." A senior lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool who won the Guardian First Book Award for "Romantic Moderns," Harris is tackling an enormous subject here. "Weatherland" is an ambitious, sweeping survey of British art and literature as seen through the lens of clouds, skies, sunshine and drizzle. Her "time travel," as Harris calls it, is roughly chronological, starting with the elegy "The Wanderer," from the eighth or ninth century. "English literature begins in the cold," she states, with icy waters, hail and wintry solitude. The Anglo-Saxons had a wonderful range of words to describe the season: "winterbiter," "winterburna," "winterceald," "wintergeweorpe." It's not the sun that provides warmth in their literature; it's the blazing indoor fires of the mead-halls. By the 13 th and 14th centuries, spring enters into the lyrics with chirping birds, unfurling leaves and blossoms. Harris leads us through the April showers in Chaucer's prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" with so much joy it inspired me to reread them. Carrying her immense knowledge lightly, never emerging as didactic or pedantic, she takes us across sodden fields and frosty meadows, through thick mist - and into the English mind. Since England is "geographically a middle ground between north and south," Harris explains, some of that "betwixt-and-between quality" is visible in early English literature, which borrows from the myths of the Norse but also from the Greeks and Romans. Maybe that's what makes the English obsession with the weather so fascinating - the ability to swing between a darker northern mood and the sunnier south, like a weather vane in the wind. In Tudor literature, the winter is always freezing cold and the spring always sunny; truthful and detailed weather observations aren't yet part of the canon. (Although Holbein produced naturalistic portraits, he didn't apply the same method to their backgrounds, mostly flat blocks of one solid color.) Yet the Elizabethans were fascinated by spectacular weather phenomena - not your daily boring gray but cosmic freak shows of lightning, thunder and storms, with the playwright Christopher Marlowe as the master of it all. Take this, from "Dr. Faustus": You stars that reigned at my nativity Whose influenc hath allotted death and hell, Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist, Into the intrails of yon labring cloud That when you vomit forth into the air, My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths So that my soul may but ascend to heaven. Marlowe's weather imagery of sucking stars and blazing meteors is outrageously visceral. But change is afoot. As Harris moves on to grand Elizabethan houses like Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, the epitome of the new "more glass than wall" style, she finds an architectural expression of a reconfigured relationship between the English and the natural world. These were houses that embraced what was outside and brought it inside. From then on, it was weather, weather, weather for the English. Elizabeth I became the weather goddess after a sudden Atlantic storm stopped the Spanish Armada; it was interpreted as a "Protestant Wind" that took England's side. Spenser's epic poem "The Faerie Queene" begins with a "hideous storme of raine," and Harris's description of his excessive renderings of the seasons is fabulous. "They trundle past like overloaded floats at carnival," she writes. "Winter with chattering teeth and breath freezing on his beard, September laden down with harvest, October tipsy with new wine." Then she turns to Shakespeare, who dramatized the relationship between weather and mood in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," where the bad weather is caused by a fight between Oberon and Titania, "legible in the winds and the cold." Harris collects examples everywhere - from plays and architecture, from poems and elegies and paintings, but also from diaries and letters. The formidable Celia Fiennes, for example, rarely mentioned the weather in her journals and letters in the late 17th century, no matter how much she was exposed to it during her travels through the British Isles, and none of the painters of her era would have taken their easels outside. "Their skies," Harris notes, "were indoor constructions." AS THE 17TH CENTURY drew to an end, the scientific revolution elevated observation and experimentation, while instrument makers began producing relatively cheap barometers. Amateur observers were able to take their own measurements, and the growth of record-keeping, as Harris puts it, "laid the groundwork for new relationships between the English and their weather." In 1730, James Thomson published "The Seasons," the most popular poem of the 18th and 19th centuries, in which the weather is the protagonist. "Few people before this would have sat down to write about landscape," Harris observes, "and certainly not the changing visual effects on it of light and wind. Afterward they could hardly be stopped." Tourists traipsed up and down the English countryside to see particular vistas in just the right weather conditions. They even carried small mirrors, called Claude glasses, and instead of looking at the scenery directly, they viewed its tinted reflection. The poet Thomas Gray was so intent on his Claude glass that he fell backward into "a dirty lane" during an excursion to the Lake District. Although he broke his knuckles, the glass remained open in his hand, enabling him to see "the sun set in all its glory." Harris tells us that Coleridge was "mesmerized by weather," that Wordsworth claimed the English sky was much more interesting than, as he wrote, the "cerulean vacancy of Italy." The painter John Constable was so concerned with accurately depicting cloud formations that he called his studies "skying." Moving on, Harris takes her readers into the 19th century and Charles Dickens's "Bleak House," a narrative so damp and rainy that the "drip, drip" becomes the heartbeat of the story and the fog "will seep its way into every crevice of the novel." But although she carries on into the 20th and 21st centuries, these last sections feel a little rushed. Harris's narrative is strongest in the past, no matter if it's icy Anglo-Saxon poetry or moist Victorian novels. 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. You might say that Harris has created her own kind of Claude glass. "I have," she writes in her introduction, "tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 28, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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