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Product Description
Product Description
The sixth volume of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, The Golden Virgin, is set in the Great War during 1916, the year of the Somme. It shows Phillip Maddison surviving in the face of terror, already a veteran of Ypres and Loos. As war destroys the countryside Phillip loves, turning it into an inferno of mud and terror, the damaged figure of the Mother of God with her Babe on a ruined church inspires the legend that war will end only when she, the Golden Virgin, topples into the ruins below. Across the narrow waters of the Channel life continues as before, with an ever-widening gulf between those at home and those who return. A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight is an epic comprising fifteen volumes. Although it should be much better known, it has attracted high praise most especially from George D. Painter (the biographer of Proust) and John Middleton Murry. 'Here is an unrolling map of the labyrinth of three generations, our fathers, ourselves and our children, and the thread leading to the mystery - monster or divinity? - at the centre. In my belief . . . the whole cycle will ultimately be recognized as the great historical novel of our time, its subject as the total experience of twentieth-century man.' George D. Painter 'This will be in its entirety one of the most remarkable English novels of our time . . . It is amazingly rich in all the living detail of a swiftly changing society; the characters are drawn with such loving sympathy and such firmness of imaginative outline that we are entirely absorbed by their vicissitudes. We are apprehensive for them, we are relieved; we rejoice and are sorrowful; we are angry and we understand and we laugh and laugh again. To e able to do this with us is the novelist's supreme gift . . . I believe it is high time we awoke to the splendour and scope of his effort and achievement in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Begin with the Dark Lantern and read on; you will be the richer for it.' John Middleton Murry The entire fifteen volume sequence is being reissued in Faber Finds.
About the Author
Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was a prolific writer best-known for Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds.
His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, 'He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic'.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Do not read this book without first reading the previous 5 novels in the sequence. Now on my second iteration through these 15 'Ancient Sunlight' novels (of which 'Golden Virgin' is the sixth), I cannot help praising this one as the best of the lot. Why are these later Henry Williamson novels, written in the 50s and 60s, not praised universally? I suppose they will remain hidden and known only by a fortunate few. I understand that HW never renounced his support of the British Nationalists (see 'A Solitary War', I think it was, for an account of his visit to Nurnberg in the '30s) and supporters of the 'other side' during the Second World War, which turns many people against him, but why not just enjoy the books for what they are? Wonderful and inspiring characters: "Spectre" West, and, best of all, Lily Cornford. There are many, many, moving episodes in this book, that will make you want to continue reading these novels, and, when you have finished, to go back to the beginning and start them all over again. This ranks for me with 'Beware of Pity' (Eng. translation of 'Ungeduld des Herzens') by Stefan Zweig as one of the best books I have ever read.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
A gutsy recounting of battlefield futility in World War I.
23 Mar 1999
Format:Paperback
Please see my complete review of "A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight" under the heading "A Fox Under My Cloak."
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