“A Flamboyant History of Planet England”: A Land is back in print

In Saturday’s Guardian Review, Robert MacFarlane re-reads A Land and reflects on its continuing power and its author’s fascinating life.  MacFarlane introduces a new edition of the book, due out shortly in the Collins Natural Library, which describes it as a classic piece of British nature writing (here it is on Amazon).  While A Land is readily found in libraries and the second-hand trade, having been a huge seller in its time, its reappearance in print (and electronically!) is very exciting.  This will bring it to new audiences and encourage further discussion of its qualities.

A Land – Then and Now

Delighted to see A Land featured in this week’s Times Literary Supplement.  Norman Nicholson’s 22 June 1951 review of Jacquetta Hawkes’ masterpiece is reprinted in the Then and Now section.  He was impressed! The review sums up what made the book unique: Jacquetta’s scientific knowledge plus her imaginative engagement with the deep past.

“As a story alone it would be immensely exciting, but Mrs Hawkes conveys much more than the excitement.  She sees it all as if it were happening now.  To her the past is not over and done with; it is alive in the present, as the child is alive in the man.”

A Land: An Object

A Land (1951) is the fusion of poetry and geology that is Jacquetta Hawkes’ best-known and most quintessential publication.  The book, and later responses to it, regularly feature on this blog.  Jacquetta believed that understanding the past and nature, how civilisation developed, was essential to human well-being, even survival.  This book expresses these ideas in a stunning new way, and resonates with activists, artists and academics to this day.

The title, in its various published and unpublished forms, is this week’s Object in the 100 Objects online exhibition at the University of Bradford.

Jacquetta circa 1951

Sandstone Grottoes

Jacquetta Hawkes helped her readers see the world around them in a new way, by sharing her scientific and imaginative identification with the past and nature.  Since reading her works and becoming custodian of her amazing archive, I have had several experiences where I realise that Jacquetta has changed the way I think.  Here is the most recent.  I’ll write about some of the others in future posts.

Amazing grottos, near Lagos on the Algarve

Visiting the Algarve, I noticed the stunning colours of the sandstone cliffs: butter yellow, ochre, sunset red, and how they sagged and slumped like old cakes, and were being eroded into fabulous grottoes.  I thought about how these rocks formed,  how they looked long ago, how they would change in future, and contrasted them with the limestone cliffs I saw elsewhere on that stunning coastline.  I don’t think I would have noticed or thought about these things before reading A Land.

Jacquetta Hawkes and the Jurassic Coast

“Where memory is deeply stirred: Jacquetta Hawkes and the Jurassic Coast”. A free talk by Dr Christine Finn, biographer of Jacquetta Hawkes, at Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, 7pm 28 September 2010. The Dorset coast was one of Hawkes’s favourite places; in her most famous work, A Land, she celebrated Mary Anning and powerfully evoked the deep past shown in Lyme Regis and Dorset geology.

The event is part of the Lyme Regis ArtsFest.

Past, Present, Man, Nature: 6. “I see a land”

Past, Present, Man, Nature: celebrating Jacquetta Hawkes.

An online exhibit by Alison Cullingford, Special Collections Librarian, University of Bradford.

Intro | Credits | Previous | Next

6. “I see a land”

A Land

“A Land” (1951), Jacquetta’s most famous book, is a book only she could have written.  As she said in her preface, “The image I have sought to evoke is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece … I see a land as much affected by the creations of its poets and painters as by changes of climate and vegetation”.  Typically, she begins with her own experience, lying on the ground of her back garden in London, which starts reflections on the geology below.  The book tapped in to interest in Britain and its history, its distinctive past, its visual heritage, and was itself an appealing artefact, with colour drawings by sculptor Henry Moore.  As Diana Collins observed, the book made such unpromising subjects as stones and the mating of reptiles fascinating and meaningful.   Jacquetta remarked that the book made a “curiously strong impression” with the public; she received the Kemsley special award for it.

Man and the Sun

“A Land” can be seen as the first of a trilogy, completed by “Man on Earth” (1954) and “Man and the Sun” (1962).  These three books drew on Jacquetta’s academic, scientific background, but went beyond this to inspire readers with her imaginative identification with the growth of human consciousness and mythologies of the sun.  Jacquetta believed that natural selection was only the mechanism for the development of consciousness, and that there was “an all-pervading and transcendent significance in human evolution”.  Her interest in dualities, complements and contrasts shows in her ideas about the feminine “Old Brain” and the masculine “New Brain”, and the replacement of mother goddesses by sky gods in prehistoric religion.