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 cliché, but radically alive to interaction between the human and the natural world.
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.
‘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
‘Rigorous scholarship and extensive biographical knowledge underpin Sampson’s text… entertaining and illuminating… arresting’
― Times Literary Supplement
‘There are fine evocations of place and season… It has so much to offer the reader’
― Literary Review