England

Originally posted here on Tumblr.

From The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke:

“I am a human child and all the vast stony, rainy English earth belongs to me. I am an English child and all the wide grey English air, full of black wings beating and grey ghosts of rain sighing, belongs to me. This being so, Robin Goodfellow, tell me, why should I be afraid?”

From Maurice, by E. M. Forster:

But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

…I’d write a long sensible post about the parallels here, and how these very different books are really saying similar things: both are about the very people who are oppressed and marginalised by English society taking back symbolic ownership of the land itself, whether that’s done using magic or otherwise (it’s significant that the first quote is probably not something John Uskglass ever actually says, but a story told about him centuries later by the magicians of England — this is how they choose to remember him), but I’m not literary enough to do that, so have this ‘put the quotes together and point at them emphatically’ thing instead.

Tags: why should i be afraid?, on a related note, margaret ford and donata torel etc. were literally 'those who took to the greenwood', which i have decided is a good reason to ship them