Volume 44, Number 16 · October 23, 1997
Lady Charlotte's Bulls
By Richard Jenkyns
From Nineveh to New York: The Strange Story of the Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Hidden Masterpiece at Canford School
by John Malcolm Russell
Yale University Press/Metropolitan Museum of Art, 232 pp., $40.00
Thomas Hardy called it Egdon Heath, and imagined its rough surface scarified by volcanic passions. Perhaps even then the heathland of Dorset was not quite as desolate or tragic as he fancied it: today the suburban tentacles of outer Bournemouth (Hardy's Sandbourne—where Tess killed Alec d'Urberville) creep toward its eastern flanks, while on another side a few nodding donkeys disclose the presence of a small oil field. To the north, where heath gives way to the country's lush, pastoral heart, in the valley of the Stour, sits Canford Manor, now a school (it too finds a place, as Chene Manor, in one of Hardy's short stories).
Review, 4226 words
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