Book description
The American Henry James's descriptions of the countryside,
monuments, universities, cathedrals, castles, customs and manners of
the English are filled with elegant charm and good humour. Here he
delights in the hidden corners of ancient Chester streets, marvels at
the drunken jollity of Epsom Derby day and savours the calm shadows of
Glastonbury abbey, in a hymn to stained-glass windows, crumbling
cottages, Norman towers, weather-beaten gables and the English genius.
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English
countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too. It has provoked a
huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and
people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are
travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long
tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the
countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's
relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the
countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).
Henry James
(1843-1916) was born in New York City and is renowned as one of the
greatest novelists in the English language. An expatriate in London from
1876, he wrote frequently about the tensions between the new world of
America and the old world of Europe. James lived in Lamb House in Rye,
East Sussex, for many years, and became a British citizen in 1915.
