With Magic in My Eyes

Nowhere in Britain have memorable words and beautiful places come together to more magical effect than in the West Country. In `With Magic in my Eyes’ Anthony Gibson explores the relationships between the region’s authors and the landscapes that inspired them, and how each brings depth, perspective and meaning to the other. His literary pilgrimage around the region includes all of the most famous author and landscape associations: Thomas Hardy and Wessex, Coleridge and the Quantocks, RD Blackmore and Exmoor, Henry Williamson and North Devon, and Daphne du Maurier and Cornwall. He also sheds new light on the lives, works and landscape inspirations of less obvious poets and novelists: Ted Hughes, DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and Charles Causley. And he rediscovers, among others, the Victorian polymath Sabine Baring-Gould, the Cornish parson Robert Hawker and the Dorset dialect poet William Barnes. With walks to bring authors and landscapes to life, atmospheric photographs, literary criticism and a deep feeling for the land, this is a highly original work which will appeal to anyone who loves the West Country and its literature.