EDITOR’S LETTER
We were inspired by the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth this summer to follow in her footsteps to the Yorkshire moorlands she loved so well, a wild landscape that was the setting for her incandescent poetry, and her only published novel, Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s strange and powerful imagination – considered so transgressive by Victorian critics that her work fell out of favour until the 20th century – might seem too filled with gothic darkness to be the starting point for a summer story; and her early death from tuberculosis, in the winter of 1848, casts a long shadow over the legend of her life. Yet whenever I return to Emily Brontë’s poetry – and indeed, to the parsonage in Haworth where she grew up with her siblings, and the path that leads to the hills where she walked with her beloved dogs – I am reminded of the light that emanates from her transcendent writing. She was born on a summer’s day – 30 July 1818 – and for all the savagery of the stormy winds that whipped Wuthering Heights, she also summoned up soft southerly breezes that gently caressed the heather-clad slopes. There is starlight, too, in Brontë’s poems, and though ghosts may wander Wuthering Heights by night, when dawn rises, it comes with the song of the lark and the promise of blue skies.
With this in mind, we bring you a new edition of Town & Country, wherein rain will not stop play: from the cricket fields of the English shires to the thrilling races run by brave thoroughbreds that capture our hearts. And aside from the traditional pleasures of the Season – regattas, rowing and regal flower shows – we are also celebrating the freedoms of wild swimming and dancing beneath the light of the moon. All this, plus a trio of delightful Dalmatians, a devoted deerhound, a flock of chickens, a pair of crowned cranes and some of the most beautiful horses in the world. Welcome to the long-awaited summer, and its manifold glories and grandeur…
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