Essays & Features

My introduction to the Little Toller Nature Classics edition, 2016.

“So Thomas goes west to Coleridge and to Spring, an odd doubling since Coleridge’s Springs are darkly uncertain times. Thomas has the ghostly ballad ‘Christabel’ in mind, a poem set in April, but an April so ominous it cannot be named and is not yet Spring. ‘Tis a month before the month of May / And the Spring comes slowly up this way.’ In the dark windless night of ‘Christabel’, the revenants of winter hang on in the woods. What moves is not alive: ‘The one red leaf, the last of its clan / That dances as often as dance it can.’ It must be the most vivid dead leaf in literature, twirling on its thread, suspended between seasons.”

‘The Abyss Beyond the Orchard’ – on The Centenary Letters edition of William Cowper’s correspondence. Slightly Foxed, Spring 2017.

“His long poem The Task (1785) seemed to articulate all the longed-for goodness of familiar, homely things; it was a tribute to ‘Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss of paradise that has survived the fall!’ Yet here, and in hundreds of the letters that began to be published from 1804 onwards, things of joy were surrounded by gulfs of loss and desolation.”

The published version of my Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture, delivered at Senate House in London in January 2015. Published by The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, with an ice blue cover.

https://www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/vw_publications.htm

“The ice itself is so transparent that one can see eels ‘in a trance’ beneath it. This will be the scene of Orlando’s first falling in love—very suddenly of course, his passion for Sasha keeping him warm even as he skates into biting winds. And then, very suddenly, the thaw will come, raindrops will fall as violent blows, and the love affair will be over…”

My introduction to the catalogue Kenneth Rowntree: A Centenary Exhibition. The show began at the Fry Art Gallery and toured to Pallant House Gallery in summer 2015.

https://lissllewellyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Rowntree-centenary.pdf

“…These were the gently dissenting manoeuvres of a committedly Dissenting artist. His non-conformist allegiances came out clearly in the ‘Freedom’ mural he contributed to the Festival of Britain, a frieze of historical scenes which included Charles I ‘rebuffed by the Speaker of the House’ and which gave a prominent place to Milton. Yet even in his still-lifes and topographies there is a radical vein.”

‘Drip, drip, drip’. A lead article in The Guardian, 15 February 2014, on the topical subject of rain in literature.

Catalogue essay for A Crisis of Brilliance at Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2013.

“Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse, leaves a picture half-done when she goes away. She knows how she wants to finish it, but history interrupts … Stanley Spencer left a half-finished painting in his bedroom when in 1915 he walked out of Cookham in his mackintosh to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. He knew just how he wanted it to be, and hoped to pick up his brush where he had left off. in Macedonia he dreamed of finishing that painting, and when he thought of death, which was close and probable on a daily basis, what he minded most was the thought of not completing the picture.”