The Rising Down
by: Alexandra Harris (Author)
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: 21 Mar. 2024
Language: English
Print Length: 512 pages
ISBN-10: 0571350526
ISBN-13: 9780571350520
Book Description
'A thrill akin to discovering buried treasure.' RICHARD MABEY'Humane, humorous and joyful.' RUTH SCURRWhen the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects - bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started - hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see? From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying encounters - spanning the Downs, Poland, Australia, Canada - inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape.By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris finds 'a World in a Grain of Sand' and opens vast new horizons.
About the Author
Review Harris digs down through geological and historical strata, unearthing life stories from the second world war, the days of the French Revolution, travelling back to the age of medieval iron-working on the Weald and beyond, to the prehistoric era when Sussex lay under a shallow sea . . . Wonderful . . . Harris demonstrates that local does not mean minor, nor parochial. -- Kathryn Hughes ― GuardianHarris takes a quadrat of land, with Storrington near its centre, and examines it as a geographer would a sample . . . It becomes thrilling to see the deep layering . . . Harris is already well known as a stunningly knowledgeable and perceptive cultural historian. Her decision to scour this small patch for meaning is a refreshing and radicalact in its way. She majestically reclaims local history, wiping the slur off provincialism. She breathes life into the scantest records of ordinary existences . . . We see the world in a grain of sand here, eternity in an hour. This book is a flint very much worth cracking. -- Hermione Eyre ― SpectatorHarris's beadily researched history of Sussex takes us on an evocative journey with poets, bailiffs and a moose. . . Starting at the moment Roman remains are disinterred from Sussex's undersoil, [Harris] tracks down the people who walked the lanes, knapped the flints, thundered from the pulpits. And through scholarly willpower, plus a bit of imaginative whimsy, she forces them into life . . . another fascinating, evocative ramble, which belongs on the shelf of every reader in the county. -- Jasper Rees ― TelegraphI will return and return to The Rising Down. I haven't read anything at all like it before. The imaginative intelligence at work here makes the landscape of Sussex come to life. A masterpiece of observation, detection and meditation. -- Fiona Stafford ― author of THE BRIEF LIFE OF FLOWERSPassionate and erudite. Harris ranges back and forth through centuries of natural and local history, looking for traces of individual lives and listening for distinctive human voices in the archives, architecture, literature and art . . . Humane, humorous and joyful. -- Ruth Scurr ― author of NAPOLEONA history of a patch of England that contains the history of a country, an Empire and its people. In a book that transcends the distinctions of life-writing, fiction and history, Harris asks what it means to inhabit a place . . . a brilliant and moving masterpiece. -- Daisy Hay ― author of DINNER WITH JOSEPH JOHNSONReading The Rising Down brings a thrill akin to discovering buried treasure, a cache of stories of forgotten people and the sinews of the Sussex landscape that helped shape them. Alexandra Harris's remarkable evocation of this world is like the roll of the downs themselves, swooping from intimate archival detail to panoramic personal reverie. -- Richard Mabey ― author of THE CABARET OF PLANTSHighly original and deeply moving . . . Harris has written the life of this place, but The Rising Down is also the life-writing of a historian from that place, of her making, and the growth of her mind there. Extraordinary and riveting throughout. -- Tim Dee ― author of GREENERYDelightful . . . The author brings to life a cast of known and unknown characters who occupied or visited this area over the centuries . . . Recollections glimmer among the great density and richness of research . . . such a joy to read. -- Frances Spalding ― BBC History MagazineIn this lyrical, almost dreamlike book, Alexandra Harris weaves her own Sussex childhood with lives long past . . . She has delved into letters, parish records and account books to extrapolate the realities of ordinary people's perspectives and concerns; where the history books concentrate on overarching politics, she looks at local minutiae . . . A jewelled patchwork of a book, sewn together from snippets of poetry, diary entries and furrowed fields. As a portrait of a place, it is hard to better. -- Octavia Pollock ― Country Life MagazineIncludes wondrous observation of the Sussex downs, the famous painters and acclaimed authors who celebrated in its surroundings. [Harris] also takes a deep delve into the archives, rescuing water bailiffs, medieval anchorites and French Resistance spies from obscurity, reviving voices and stories from the past and beautifully imagining how they may have felt about where they lived. -- Eithne Farry ― Simple Things
Book Description A luminous feat of time travel chronicling lives in a Sussex landscape from the prize-winning author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland.
About the Author Alexandra Harris is an acclaimed writer, literary critic and cultural historian. She was educated at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute and is now Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper(2010) won the Guardian First Book Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (2015) was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, adapted for BBC Radio 4 and chosen ten times as a 'Book of the Year'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Harris reviews for the Guardian and other newspapers as well as judging literary prizes, writing for exhibition catalogues, working with artists, lecturing widely and speaking on the radio. www.alexandraharris.co.uk'A joy to read.' Sunday Times 'Breathtaking.' Guardian'Highly eclectic and original.' Sunday Telegraph'Hugely ambitious.' TLS 'The wit and wonder of an exceptional literary work.' New Statesman 'An inspiring guide.' Daily Mail
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