Margaret Drabble on the Romantics

A highly acclaimed novelist on the way in which the landscape has both influenced and been represented in British Romantic literature.

Margaret Drabble on the Romantics presents an image of Britain as seen through the eyes of some of its most celebrated writers. Many of the Romantics, as well as their successors, are closely associated with particular landscapes—the Wordsworths with the Lake District, Walter Scott with the Scottish Borders, and the Bronte¨ sisters with West Yorkshire. Drabble deepens our understanding of this connection, unpacking the Romantics’ fascination with all varieties of rural landscape, from roaring seas to tranquil villages, while also exploring their writing’s subtler associations.

Herself a literary luminary, Drabble illuminates how this love of place fashioned some of the Romantics’ greatest works. She considers the resonances of myth and legend, art and earlier literature that the Romantics found in places such as North Wales and Cornwall, and investigates how their writing has, in turn, shaped our visual attitudes, taste in landscape and relation to nature.