The Pinecone - Couverture rigide

Uglow, Jenny

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0571269508 ISBN 13 : 9780571269501

Editeur : Faber & Faber, 2012

Synopsis

The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

'Absorbing, illuminating and brilliantly crafted.' --Salley Vickers, Observer Books of the Year
'Jenny Uglow's The Pinecone is about the language of carving, objects and containing ideas. It is the story of Sarah Losh, a north country heiress in the early 19th century, forceful, learned, independent, who built a church full of fascinating images. The tale is mysterious because Uglow worked with almost no manuscript remains and scrupulously invented nothing. She has turned this central silence into a kind of force by describing stones, glass, things constructed, so precisely that they become not exactly alive but strangely present on the page ... I don't know another book that feels quite like this one.' --A. S. Byatt, New Statesman Books of the Year
'Most lives reheat familiar cabbage. It is a brave biographer who resurrects an unknown or forgotten character. Jenny Uglow's The Pinecone is the fastidious but fascinating story of Sarah Losh, a Cumbrian heiress, spinster and visionary, who used her alkali fortune to build a stubbornly individual church at Wreay in 1842, which kicked off the Byzantine revival.' --Nicholas Shakespeare, Telegraph Books of the Year

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. This vivid, original book tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Sarah combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower - there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs and poppies; an arrow pierces the wall as if shot from a bow; a tortoise-gargoyle launches itself into the air. And everywhere there are pinecones, her signature in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life and death and rebirth.

Sarah's story is also that of her radical family - friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge; of the love between sisters and the life of a village; of the struggle of the weavers, the coming of the railways, the findings of geology and the fate of a young northern soldier in the Afghan war. Above all, though, it is about the joy of making and the skill of local, unsung craftsmen.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Faber & Faber
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0571269508
• ISBN 13: 9780571269501
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 344