England's green and pleasant land

   

    "Auden's [Oxford Book of] Light Verse was one of hundreds of anthologies that appeared in the late 1930s and during the war, and which saw their task as an urgent saving up of England's heritage. They were storehouses and hold-alls, containers in which to put personal treasures. And the anthology infected other genres with its elasticity. It lent its acquisitive aesthetic to the novel, to cinema, to painting and architecture, all of which stretched their limits to see how much of the past they might hold."

    I quote that passage from Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper because in some ways it represents the spirit of this book itself. Much like "the seductive images of abundance" which characterised Edith Sitwell's 1930s prose and which her biographer Victoria Glendinning described as "her catalogue technique", so this book is a marvellous portmanteau, a Mary Poppins carpet bag full of art, literature, architecture, music, food, garden design, film, ceramics, the weather, even, and more. It's a cavalcade or pageant depicting the romantic response to modernism in the twentieth century, bursting with enthusiasm for its subject and inspiring a similar excitement in the reader. I found it enormously stimulating, very accessible - it is meant for the non-specialist - and as a means of propulsion, inspiring one to go and look at certain paintings, listen to music, read the novels and other works referred to, consider landscapes both natural and manmade, it's very powerful indeed.

    From Virginia Woolf to Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Geoffrey Grigson, Paul Nash, John Piper, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Cecil Beaton, Powell and Pressburger, Daphne du Maurier, to name a scant few, the book examines the imaginative movement which sought to draw on England's heritage - often its rural or provincial one: nostalgic, rooted in place, a gathering up of the past as a protection against the future. I've seen the book criticised for its very inclusiveness as - contrarily - for its omissions; I'm no authority on this so I shan't try to comment, but instead I would say that if you are interested in British culture between the wars, if you're drawn to any of the names listed above, if you are intrigued by the cross-fertilisation of ideas and influences in the wider world of the arts or if you revel in books written with enormous knowledge and an ability to communicate passion, then this is for you. Well done to the judges of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award who gave it the prize; it's an absolute delight.

(Alexandra Harris's website is here).

Comments

[Simon T]

I think I'll pop to Waterstones in my teabreak and use my book tokens on this...

[Cornflower]

Do, Simon!

[Dark Puss]

How much British versus English culture is discussed in this book?

[Cornflower]

As the title suggests, it is for the most part concerned with English culture.

[Oxslip]

and quite heavily focussed on Oxfordshire and its environs, I assume because the PhD was written in Oxford with Hermione Lee's supervision
It's a beautiful book too - one to see on paper rather than Kindle if your library has it

[Frances]

And I would love to see this one in paper too. Like Simon, I believe I have enough holiday love left to pick this up.