Weatherland: Writers & Artists under English Skies

by Alexandra Harris

A lively look at the English literary and artistic responses to the weather from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Keats and Ian McEwan In a sweeping panorama, Weatherland allows us to witness England’s cultural climates across the centuries. Before the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxons living in a wintry world wrote about the coldness of exile or the shelters they had to defend against enemies outside. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossoms and cuckoos. Descriptions of a rainy night are rare before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics had adopted the squall as a fit subject for their most probing thoughts.

The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, and Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a twelfth-century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1684, and the Sunspan house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. “Bloody cold,” says Jonathan Swift in the “slobbery” January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one. Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life story of those who have lived in it. 60+ illustrations

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Nature, Art, Books About Books, British Literature, Literature

432 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2015

About the author

Alexandra Harris is a British writer and academic.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can tell when someone is English, as they will talk about the weather whenever possible. They will study the weather forecasts for the glimmer of hope that a sunny day offers and are as surprised as the experts in the Met office when it rains. In this book, Harris takes a detailed examination of the responses to the wide variety of weather and the seasons that authors and artists have had over two millennia. Early Roman mosaics have been discovered with seasonal details, and ancient Saxon writings have lamentations on the coldness of exile and their writing talks about how many winters old people were. Focus on particular details of the weather, such as storms, birdlife, rain clouds and flowers, fascinated different eras in turn. Harris has unearthed all sorts of treasures; a fragile glass with a silver rim, last used at the frost fairs when the Thames regularly froze over, the scowling face of Winter in a Roman mosaic and chart for predicting the weather for the year ahead.

Harris has written a dense tome, but thankfully not an unreadable one. Each chapter is packed full of detail for each era, subject and individual covered. Her readable prose is enhanced with excellent reproductions and photographs, as we have come to expect from the art publisher Thames and Hudson. This makes this not only a pleasure to read, but it is a joy to hold and look at too. A very good book that can be dipped into time and time again.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weatherland is endlessly fascinating, a study of the representation of weather by English artists and writers from the earliest times till now. Alexandra Harris is an engaging guide to an engrossing subject and imparts enormous learning in beautifully elegant prose. Her responses range from the academic to the personal and make Weatherland a joy to read. The book as an item is beautifully produced, from the gorgeous jacket, to the powder blue boards, creamy paper and rich selection of illustrations.

[William Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of great books that leaves you wanting to read a dozen more books that are cited in it.

[Sophy H · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting and highly thorough book of the interpretation of weather by artists and writers through history.........and when I say history I mean we take it right back to the Middle Ages!

Harris has done a great deal of research here and has put together a LOT of references to weather over the course of English history. There are a few literary big hitters in there, Woolf, Shakespeare, Chaucer and of course Turner gets a mention for his epic weather and particularly sky scenes. It's interesting how we get a sense of weather changing through the centuries; colder winters, drier summers giving way to wetter summers and foggy, mizzly winters (think Dickens and London smog).

Admittedly I lost my thread a couple of times in the reading as there is a hell of a lot to get through, but that's on me and my concentration levels, not the writer. As it's a library loan, I felt like I was rushing to get through some of the pages.

A great book however detailing artists being influenced by and interpreting the weather in their work. A novel way of looking at this phenomena.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is in the same genre of scholarly non-fiction as Robert Macfarlane's and Peter Davidson's various literary explorations of place and time, but, I would say, not quite in the same league as far as the actual writing goes (but then Macfarlane and, perhaps especially, Davidson, produce works of such consummate quality, that this need not be a severe criticism). As with so many academic works, the introductory and conclusory chapters are by far the best (with the very final sentence surely in the running at least for best final sentence of any academic book: 'and then, for just a moment, I saw an octopus dancing over the graves.'), where Harris has let loose thoughts and words and achieved near-perfect bookends. The chapters in-between, while chock-full of interesting and absorbing material, are a little run-of-the-mill, being presented in the conventional chronological manner and relying heavily on quotes and paraphrases of the artists and writers through whose works the book tries to piece together a history not of English weather, but of epochal perceptions of English weather. This is all perfectly acceptable, of course, and the material itself most riveting, but the organization of it can hardly be said to break new ground. And format does matter, very much, because it influences the type of thing it is possible to think; it forms an espalier on which thoughts can only be trained to take on certain pre-determined forms.
A more substantive gripe, albeit again a small and perhaps inconsequential one under the circumstances, is that it becomes obvious at various points, not least in the chapter on Ruskin, that Harris struggles with the concepts of what constitutes objective, subjective and inter-subjective knowledge and the relative possibilities of each, much like Ruskin did himself. It would have been nice if Harris had, with the added advantage of a hundred years of humanities scholarship since Ruskin's writing days, been able to add a more sophisticated layer of analysis to this problem.
To sum up, this was definitely a worthwhile and enjoyable read, but if you'd prefer a pithier and more spirited account of (the perception of) English weather over the past 500 years, I might recommend Virginia Woolf's Orlando in the first instance (a title, as it happens, that Harris herself frequently references).

[Andrea Engle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant revelation of how English literature chronicles English meteorology ... a fascinating study of English weather as the backdrop for English writings, as well as English art ... from Beowulf through Cowper to Shelley through Austen on to Dickens and Hardy and into the present, complemented by Turner, Constable, Whistler, and Hockney ... displays great breadth of learning ...

[Kimberley Starr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A literary and artistic history of Britain via it's weather. What an ingenious idea for a book! Lovely way to spend a hot summer's day reading, and a good way to add titles to my tbr list!

[R.R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the first half of this book but slogged through to the end.

The first part uses the merest scraps to reconstruct our ancestors' attitudes to the English weather, reminding me with every page just how different their relationship was to the seasons, the land and the sky. On every page there was a line that made me stop and reflect, often moved to the point of disorientation. And a diversion into the world of the London frost fairs is among the most mesmerising things I have read this year.

But the second part of the book, disappointingly, is like a series of university literature essays strung together, plodding through the imagery of the Romantic poets, for example, whose attitudes to the English weather don't require much detective work, thus leaving more room for something far less interesting: interpretation.

Perhaps this is my problem rather than the book's. I studied English at university and so much of this was familiar ground, whereas the first half was almost all new ground to me.

It seems to have been written in chunks, as a series of articles and essays, so I don't think it would be rude to read it that way, dipping in and out. On that basis, I'd recommend it.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was in primary and high school I wanted to be a weatherman. It never happened, but I'm still very curious about the weather and love looking at the sky. I read a review of this book in the NY Times several months ago and thought it sounds like an interesting premise. When I saw the book in a lovely indie bookshop in Sydney on Oxford Street, I decided to buy it then and there. The premise is that the author follows the mention of weather and what constituted good and bad weather in England specifically. She documents the changing weather patterns from literature and poetry from about the 11th century through to the 20th. She shows that rarely was weather depicted in paintings of the medieval era through to the mid 1700's rarely was the sky or weather portrayed in paintings, even those supposedly set in the out of doors. There are a lot of illustrations in the book, and heaps of quotes from a variety of writers tracing the UK climate through this period and how it correlates with what is known now through climate study. I found this book fascinating. It would be of interest to anyone interest in the current climate debate.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book. The cover is gorgeous, the illustrations are fantastic, and it looks good on the shelf. So much so that I'm just going to go ahead and put it up there. It's not bad by any means: Harris has a clear and interesting voice, and is wisely insightful about how the weather is reflected in the arts in Britain. But there is no real narrative drive in the book--no impetus to turn the page, no real point other than the weather. Which is not a bad thing. Sometimes all you want to do is lie on your back and look at clouds. I will save this book for a day (or a week) when that's all I want to do.

[Karen Charbonneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a delightful read. Who ever imagined that the English viewed weather variously during different historical epochs, especially in literature and in paintings. If you are a fan of English literature, from Beowulf through Shakespeare and into the Romantics and on, you will gain so much insight into your favorite classics by reading this book. Every evening I could hardly wait to crawl into bed and turn on my light - I had a hardback copy. There isn't a dull paragraph, so don't be concerned because it's nonfiction. Karen Charbonneau, Author of The Wolf's Sun, et al.

[Riet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een schitterend geschreven en geillustreerd boek. Wel voor de liefhebbers. Harris beschrijft de invloed van het Engelse weer op schrijvers, dichters en schilders over een periode vanaf de vroege middeleeuwen tot nu. Het wordt nergens saai, ondanks het feit, dat er niet echt veel gebeurt, wil je het toch uitlezen. Ik denk, dat je zo'n boek ook over het Nederlandse weer zou kunnen schrijven. In ieder geval over de invloed op de schilders.

[Lisa Matriccino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. If you’re a weather lover, lit lover, and an Anglophile this book is your holy grail. It needs to be savored. I read one chapter a day to let it all sink in before starting another. It’s as beautifully written as the literature it describes. It’s also awakened in me a new appreciation for Beowulf and Chaucer. The history it imparts is as interesting and informative as the ideas about weather and people.

[Margaret Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard Alexandra Harris speak at the Budleigh Literary Festival. She is an accomplished speaker who wears her intellect lightly. Despite the broad canvas both in time and personalities, I found the book engrossing and has made be think about literature and art in a new way.

[Nigel Herritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fascinating read. I'm glad the publication made its way to NS vacuumed in shrinkwrap—maybe because of the paper dust cover? The book reads like a splash in an ocean of writing on the topic of weather and the history of English writing in general. It seemed like too big a scope to string a story from, but the author manages to draw a narrative like a cirrus cloud across a big sky, placing the essays in relief of a mellinia's worth of blueish thought. Only a life examining the weather and the 'small gains' of English observers, with a focus on the mundane without discount, could result in this honest collection of essays. Again, a fascinating read. I look forward to discovering more of this author's work.

[Sarah Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot pretend to having read all of this book - just up to and including Shakespeare. It is a real tour de force, interesting and illuminating but jam packed with facts . Alexandra Harris writes beautifully and the amount of research she does is staggering. I enjoyed what I read but I need a break before restarting.

[Laura Degenhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful journey through centuries of British art and literature examining references to weather. I started reading this during a long wait in the A&E department of my local hospital, and read for 8 hours straight without once losing interest in the text. As I read, I found myself hunting for a pen to mark the margins, and referring to the references as a rich resource for further reading. The final chapter is a useful introduction to ideas around the anthropocene and contemporary British artists and poets engaging with British psychogeography and ecological concerns. I felt that this chapter could easily become the starting point for another book. Because of the review format of this work, I was slightly frustrated that the author was not able to devote more pages to contemporary artists and writers. I hope that this will be a future project for her, as she is a deft, light footed writer who educates with skill and humour.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing work of much scholarship and even more passion. Some reviewers have said it bogged down half-way through. I say they didn't stick through for the entire miracle. The weather in England fairly swarms and swishes through the pages of literature and on to the canvasses that hang in great museums. Ms. Harris gives us new ways to look at all our old favorites and introduces us to classics we had skimmed or laid to rest long ago, makes us want to read them again just to see how the weather fairs between their pages. Thank you, Alexandra, for this extraordinary work.

[Estelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no bad weather. There is only just the weather in all kind of different ways. I specially liked the Anglo-Saxon stories, loving the word wanderer. I was surprised the man who first kept weather records for a long time, for just over sixty years, Thomas Barker, lived in nearby Lyndon. Of course Turner is also part of the story. Some parts on the contemporary history, such as the early morning shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4, was recognizable. After reading this book I even go and look more interested in the fabulous English cloud patterns.

[Lee Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exhaustively researched book about the depiction of the weather in art and literature. A beautifully designed book, chock full of paintings and illustrations. I really liked the use of light blue backgrounds on some of the sections, appropriately apples to “The Great Frost” and “Cloudland”.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just beautiful. Read it if you love English literature, literary history, and Orlando. Harris is a gifted writer with a gorgeous sense of metaphor. One of the best reads of the year.

[Harriet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally brilliant and very inspiring, gave me a lot of new thoughts I will take some time to examine

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weatherland is a historical exploration of how English culture has responded to the weather from the Romans to the present. It offers fascinating insights into how people in England have seen and thought about the weather and how that has affected visual art, literature, buildings and clothing. Harris shares a wealth of quotes from writers including Chaucer, Milton and Virginia Woolf, analysing their attitudes, with for example an interesting compare and contrast in attitudes to the weather from the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. The book is lavishly illustrated, including photos of baptismal fonts, pages from medieval illuminated manuscripts and paintings by artists including Constable, Turner and L S Lowry. The last chapter brings things totally up to date by assessing why writing about the weather is important:

"..accounts of direct, sensual, even overwhelming weather experience are prized by readers increasingly regretful of their separation from natural places and natural processes. Many readers are grateful, too, for reminders of all those little landmarks in the cycle of the year, which are too easily missed if the office looks the same each day, and you travel home in the dark. At just this moment, when the average diary looks less like a medieval almanac than ever, English culture has turned passionately seasonal. And in this critical period when climate change threatens to throw the seasons out of kilter, artists and writers have reaffirmed the wonders of the years repeating stages."

This final chapter also considers the role of the arts in terms of representing and reflecting on climate change, one of the great challenges of our times.

This is a scholarly (though not actually academic) book of cultural criticism that focuses on the topic of the weather, bringing together ideas in a way that I found fascinating. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in our relationship with the weather.

[Delphine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weatherland is one hell of a ride: it's a history of English culture of the past millenium, told as a story of changing ideas about the weather. As a leitmotiv, Harris uses story elements from Orlando, the novel in which Virginia Woolf wrote the weather of centuries.

The history of English weather can be read as a dialectic movement. In Anglo-Saxon times, winter was very prominent and associated with wisdom. In Anglo-Norman days, the emphasis shifted to spring and the cycle of work, play and worship in relation to the seasons. Elisabethan writers such as Shakespeare were fascinated with spectacular weather and tempests. Harris pays attention to contradictions within certain literary and artistic movements: whereas Coleridge was drawn to extremes, Wordsworth saw nature as a gentle friend, with restorative powers. Keats was the great English poet of stillness, but his friend Shelley believed in the revolutionary powers of the wind and the sea.

Weatherland is also a history of science: the first ideas about weather weren't based on empirical observation, but on ideas, such as the correlation between the weather and the four humours of the human body (blood, choler, melancholy, phlegm). This changed with the publication of New Atlantis by Francis Bacon: it is the first study of real natural things. With the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660, the shift to the observable was complete.

There's also the emotional impact of weather: the Seasonal Affective Disorder is real, and afflicts about 3% of the population. As a reader, I can also testify that the weather has an influence on your reading experience- very often, I remember in which circumstances I read a particular book.

Weatherland is erudite, clever and complete: often a joy to read and a real discovery, but at times pretty obscure and dense, especially in the final chapters (20th century).

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the final chapter of this book Alexandra Harris identifies a new school of English writing. It is marked by a self-conscious return to nature at a time when people are increasingly alienated from it by the physical landscapes of cities and the convenient elisions of technology. I've read a couple of books in this vein, most notably Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks. Taking that book as representative, it is a style of prose writing influenced by poetry's quest for closeness of word and thing. MacFarlane delights in dialectal words for geographically specific weather phenomenon. This also makes it very self-conscious, slipping quite easily into cringe-making preciousness. The problem is that prose has no rules: if the writer is enjoying themselves there is no rhyme or metre to restrain their purple wanderings.

Weatherland belongs to that genre. It is bookended by two first-person accounts of weather-experience which read like bad imitations of MacFarlane. In between are a series of loose essays on the representation of weather by various artists and writers through history. Harris did not strike me as having a particularly clear critical voice: the parts of more pure literary history were much more interesting than Harris' interpretations of them. But they were not very rigorous. I suppose one might call it a florilegium: a collection of excerpts and pretty observations. Reading it was a bit like scrolling through Tumblr: a passing sense of prettiness, with little to remember at the end of it. The sections I liked best were invariably those about writers or artists I had little to no prior knowledge of, e.g. James Thomson, author of the once popular but now obscure 18th century poem The Seasons.

[Alex Sarll]

It was the subtitle 'Writers and artists under English skies' that grabbed me, that and a cover which at one point I was lucky enough to see almost replicated outside the window while I read Weatherland on a train to the west. Really, though, this is a better book to read a section at a time than try to go straight through; the scope of it, the amount of information and some deeply soothing quality to all those clouds and mists have tended to bump me into a state of benign fugue otherwise. Harris opens with the cold in the Anglo-Saxon bones, taking us into the warming Middle Ages and the surprisingly late arrival of spring - not just year by year, but as a concept and a name, where once the English year had got by with two seasons. The sheer volume of material she's dug up from often obscure sources and marshalled to brilliant effect in these early chapters, showing how (for instance) the stereotype of the English as always talking about the weather only really starts to apply around the end of the 17th century, meant that for me the book very slightly drops off once the focus shifts more to individual writers and their relationship with the climate, even if they are of course still doing their bit to shape wider attitudes and perceptions, and in turn being shaped by the climate variations of their times (the Year without a Summer's role in the birth of horror being the most famous example). But from Johnson's attempts to resist the weather, to Shelley's fatal longing for oneness with it, I must emphasise that 'very slightly'; if the dampness of Tennyson is hardly news, the idea that Robinson Crusoe never once describes a sunrise or sunset is astounding. Hell, she's even found a link between art and melon farming beyond badly censored action movies.

[mariam]

Who can say how much is 'there' in nature, and how much is made by our shape-imposing minds?

this was such a stunning read. i fell in love with the premise and it was a joy to read about how the weather has influenced these artists and writers. the author has a really lovely writing style, and some bits almost moved me to tears—particularly the chapters 'day by day' and 'the stillness of keats' (the 2009 film bright star depicts this stillness so beautifully, please watch it!). something about people across vast swaths of time trying to make sense of and being inspired by the world around them makes me want to weep. whether they are glasses seemingly carved from ice, paintings depicting the majesty of the sky and light, meticulously written diary accounts over decades, or poems celebrating the beautiful stillness of autumn, the things they created in response to what they saw and felt are time capsules through which we can for a moment experience the world as they saw it....for a moment we are basking in the afternoon warmth under the autumn foliage, skating along the frozen thames, or caught under a raging storm. weather has a profound effect on us all, and we each respond to it in our own way. i am always thinking about the passage of time in relation to humanity so this was a very special read indeed <3

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first three-quarters of the book - the quotes from the ancient tomes, the way the weather, the cloudy skies started to infiltrate art and literature ... slowly. I was quite amazed that in painting, for instance, artists didn't consider nature as a thing in itself, but just as a barely rendered background for portraits and religious art. I enjoyed learning about and reading excerpts from texts like the Exeter book and anecdotes about when the Thames froze and the Spanish Armada was quashed by the huge storm. But, as the book progressed I found it to be a bit ponderous for a layperson like myself - and it moved through, what I thought were the really interesting bits, too swiftly. It left me a bit disappointed even though it was a long and information filled read....

[Inken · Rating 3 out of 5]

The weather is the one the us Brits discuss, analyse, complain about and appreciate and yet sometimes we seem to take it utterly for granted. Harris has written a looooong book, a thesis really, on the British weather and how it has impacted culture over the centuries, affecting art and literature in so many ways. From the earliest illuminated manuscripts depicting farmers at work in all seasons through Wordsworth, JW Turner and beyond, the British weather has been a motivating factor in so many artists' lives and work.

This is a great analysis and depiction of countless amazing works produced over the past 1000+ years and I'm sure our notorious weather will inspire many many more!

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fine book. Not just because it is well researched, speaks to the British heart for weather, references wide and appropriate literature, and meets the zeitgeist in its concern for climate, vulnerability and human response - but because it is so very well written.

I would recommend this to those who love poetry, history, or literature, those who are fascinated by the weather, those who are moved by humanity and our place in the world, and those who simply enjoy great writing.

Any one of the above, and you will enjoy Weatherland.