A Writer’s Britain by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is one of my favorite authors, but for many years I made no particular effort to read A Writer’s Britain. I figured it was a typical coffee-table book: a lot of pretty pictures of English countryside with some skimpy text. But eventually I was curious enough to take a look for myself.

I should have known that the industrious Drabble, whose reaction to writer’s block was to edit The Oxford Companion to English Literature, would not have put her name on a book that was less than thorough and well researched. A Writer’s Britain is packed with allusions, quotations, and thoughtful discussion of writers from Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Dickens to Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy.

Drabble is too modest to discuss her own work, but her sense of place and the way it shapes human lives is second to none. This is from The Witch of Exmoor:

Frieda walked on through the ancient woodland. It spoke to her of decay, her own decay. The trees were encrusted with lichen, and small ferns sprouted from them, as orchids sprout from the trees of a tropical rain forest. Fungus grew from living holes and dying trunks and dead logs. Grey-white oyster outcrops clustered. Ash, birch, oak and thorn, the old trees of Northern Europe. Some leant from the steep slope at perilous angles, and others were uprooted, reaching their inverted crowns into the air like great matted discs of red ogre hair, of monstrous curling fibre. Twisted faces peered at her from severed, scarred and stunted limbs. She passed the hollow tree, inside which stood a small lake on which a miniature elfin armada might sail. Scale was crazily distorted in this wracked and rent, this Rackham woodland. There was an overpowering smell of rich wet damp and decay. Stumps rose through the leafmould like old teeth. Frieda’s tongue joggled her bridgework, and from beneath her loose bridge an acrid, bitter taste seeped into her mouth. It was the taste of death.