I’ve been neglecting my blog recently as I transition from Wilde to Nesbit but I’m keen to keep posting when I can. We’re planning our holidays in England this year and our odyssey will take us from Keswick in the Lake District (where the husband is running a race), then diagonally down through England to Canterbury (I’m speaking at a conference) via Cambridge. We’ll stay a night in Whitstable, as featured in Sarah Water’s brilliant novel Tipping the Velvet, before heading on to Salisbury (where we’ll see Stonehenge), then to Cornwall to stay with friends and reacquaint ourselves with the lovely seaside town of St. Ives. We travel home via Stratford-Upon-Avon.
I cannot wait. I love England (I lived there for years and my eldest son was born there) but lately it’s just been Brexit Brexit Brexit and I need to fall back in love with that magnificent, historic country. As part of my research for my new biography I’ve been reading E. Nesbit’s beautiful descriptions of her beloved Kent countryside, in particular the River Medway, where she loved to go boating. She recognised an authenticity in river life. In The Incredible Honeymoon, she wrote:
On the Medway life is real, life is earnest. You mostly pull a hundred yards, anchor and fish; or if you do go farther from harbor you open your own locks, with your own crowbar.
River Medway, Kent
Here’s a lovely piece of descriptive writing from her novel Salome and the Head:
The Medway just above The Anchor (at Yalding, Kent) is a river of dreams. The grey and green of willows and alders mirror themselves in the still water in images hardly less solid-seeming than their living realities. There is pink loosestrife there, and meadow-sweet creamy and fragrant, forget-me-nots wet and blue, and a tangle of green weeds and leaves and stems that only botanists know the names of.
Particularly calming is this tranquil, languid excerpt from The Incredible Honeymoon:
The quiet river, wandering by wood and meadow, bordered by its fringe of blossoms and flowering grasses, the smooth backwaters where leaning trees touched hands across the glassy mirror, and water-lilies gleamed white and starry, the dappled shadows, the arch of blue sky, the gay sunshine, and the peace of the summer noon all wrought in one fine spell to banish from their thoughts all fear and dismay, all doubts and hesitations.
We won’t be boating on the Medway this time round but Edith Nesbit has inspired me to make plans for the future. I hope we’ll always have the opportunity to visit the beautiful home of our British neighbours, just as I hope they/you will continue to visit us.
For more on holidays in Kent visit: http://www.visitkent.co.uk
If you’re looking for a holiday read try Wilde’s Women
Beside Every Man 