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Maybe someday
45
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
50/100Critics
40/100Scholars
Author:
Rachel Eisendrath
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Date:
May 11, 2021
Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as "some luminous globe" wherein "all the seeds of English fiction lie latent." In Gallery of Clouds, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds.
What The Reviewers Say
... brief but intense.
Ms. Eisendrath works partly to illuminate Sidney’s famous but rarely read 16th-century romance, and partly to examine what retrospection is and what it (and also literature) might be for. Her title speaks to the floating, mutable quality of thought ('clouds,' she notes, 'are always in the process of becoming something else'), but also to the sense of grandeur and magic that works like Sidney’s can convey.
Part of the dream of immersion means recognizing that it is just a dream, always destined to end. But in highlighting that tension, Eisendrath makes us recognize how much of our reading lives puts us in a conflicted state.
Eisendrath (Poetry in a World of Things), a scholar of English Renaissance poetry, combines criticism and memoir in these immersive meditations on Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral romance, Arcadia.
