Six Facets of Light by Ann Wroe review – a mesmerising hybrid of biography, memoir and nature writing

Eric Ravilious, Samuel Palmer and William Blake all feature in this personal meditation on the mystery of light, set mainly on England’s South Downs

Ann Wroe has long been a unique voice in nonfiction, although there are signs that everyone else may finally be catching up. Certainly you see her influence in that new generation of young scholars who ally meticulous literary research with shimmering, visionary prose – Robert Macfarlane comes to mind, as does Alexandra Harris. Wroe’s particular biographical beat has always lain with subjects from the distant past who inhabit that murky space where history frays into myth: Pontius Pilate, Perkin Warbeck. Far from excavating a CV for her subjects from the accumulated cultural rubble, her approach has always been to enjoy them in all their many guises. The result is a careful unwinding of the singular subject so that he (and Wroe writes mainly about men) becomes fragmented through many different retellings. Surprisingly for someone who revels in such a state of not-knowing, Wroe’s day job is as a long-serving editor at the Economist, a publication where they definitely prefer you to stick to the facts.

Like a modernist painter making that final push from reportage to abstraction, Wroe’s recent work has been even less concerned with the flinty historical record than its luminous afterglow. And nowhere is this more clear than in her new book, which is less an account of the physical properties of light than a meditation on its meaning. Instead of having a single life holding it together, Wroe has dispersed her narrative among a whole squad of visual and literary artists. Eric Ravilious, William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Samuel Coleridge do most of the heavy lifting, but there are also significant contributions from Edward Thomas, JMW Turner, John Clare, in fact anyone who has ever drawn light towards them and sent it back into the world slightly changed. Even the 1950s crooner Perry Como makes an appearance, having once put a fallen star in his pocket.

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