The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape
When acclaimed cultural historian, author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland, Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris finds ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’ and opens vast new horizons, becoming our intimate companion as we travel on visionary journeys through space and time. 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. Who has stood here, Alexandra asks, and what did they see?
