Gallery of Clouds

A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading. 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