How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #7
That glass of water you hold to my lips,
Had I my lenses, would reveal to us
Not limped clarity as we suppose—
Pure water—but a seething, striving horde
Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails
Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds
Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe. (11.9)
This excerpt from Randolph Henry Ash's poem on the biologist Jan Swammerdam gives us another taste of Ash's diverse interests in the natural world. Here, we see him describing microbial life through comparisons to the biggest creatures in the ocean. That surprising and counterintuitive comparison really helps to emphasize the sublimity of the "infinitely small" (10.4).
Quote #8
The Pickering-Grosmont line travels through the Newtondale Gorge—a cleft formed during the Ice Age—where the engine produces, amongst romantically desolate moorland, a sublime volanic eruption of its own, due to the steepness of the gradient. It put me in mind of Milton's Saton, winging his black way through the asphaltic fumes of Chaos—and of Lyell's solid, patient yet inspired work on the raising of the hills and the carving of the valleys by ice. (12.17)
The letters that Randolph Henry Ash writes home to his wife during his expedition to North Yorkshire reveal just how much he knew about geology. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Ash seems to have no difficulty accepting the vast geological age of the Earth. You'll find no religious or existential despair in here, at least as far as these issues go.
Quote #9
And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with—something? Women writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. (13.7)
Byattisn't just interested in exploring the relationship between "man" and the natural world: some of her characters also muse on women's relationships with nature, too. This excerpt from Leonora Stern's book on the works of Christabel LaMotte lends a distinctly feminist flair to possible interpretations of natural landscapes and their representation in literature.