The love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman, covering all varieties of the British rural and urban landscape. This book presents an image of Britain as seen by writers of different regions and periods, and also illuminates the way in which their work has changed our visual attitudes, our taste in landscape and our relation to nature.

For this new edition of her engaging study, Ms. Drabble has made corrections and updates to the text throughout and written a new epilogue.

Dame Margaret Drabble Holroyd, DBE (née Drabble; born 5 June 1939), commonly known as simply Margaret Drabble, is an English novelist, biographer and critic.

Drabble has published seventeen novels to date.

Novels

A Summer Bird Cage (1963)

The Garrick Year (1964)

The Millstone (1965 有中譯)

Jerusalem the Golden (1967 有中譯)

The Waterfall (1969)

The Needle's Eye (1972)

The Realms of Gold (1975)

The Ice Age (1977 有中譯)

The Middle Ground (1980)

Hassan's Tower (1980)

The Radiant Way (1987)

A Natural Curiosity (1989)

The Gates of Ivory (1991)

The Witch of Exmoor (1996)

The Peppered Moth (2001)

The Seven Sisters (2002 有中譯)

The Red Queen (2004 有中譯)

The Sea Lady (2006)

Selected non-fiction

Wordsworth (Literature in Perspective series) (1966)

Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1974)

The Genius of Thomas Hardy (ed.) (1976)

For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age (1978)

A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979)

Angus Wilson: A Biography (1995)

The Oxford Companion to English Literature (ed.; 5th & 6th edns) (1985, 2000)

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (2009)