It's been a long winter at Fermilab. At times, it's called for a brief escape to.... Barsetshire. In a January editorial New York Times editor Verlyn Klinkenborg told Times readers of his pleasure in the novels of Angela Thirkell, chronicler of the fictional English county of Barsetshire originally created by Anthony Trollope. Between 1933 and her death in 1961, Thirkell wrote a series of 29 Barsetshire novels depicting the minutiae of English county life-a way of life that was vanishing even as she wrote about it. Nowhere, on the face of it, could be farther from the chill landscape of an Illinois physics laboratory than the charmingly circumscribed world of the lovely Mrs. Brandon, the gallant but impoverished Lord Pomfret, the headstrong Clarissa and their lives and loves and Coronation fêtes. As the winter dragged on, a restorative sojourn in Barsetshire seemed just the ticket. And yet, as Klinkenborg says, "As you read her, you can feel the world around you poking and prodding at her text."
Indeed you can. As when you come upon this passage from Thirkell's 1951 novel, "The Duke's Daughter," in which Lord Cecil Waring, is showing the daughter of the Duke of Omnium, Lady Glencora Palliser, around his ancestral home, Belier's Priory.
Outside the long drawing-room was a terrace overlooking the gardens, the field beyond, and the woods across the valley.
"That's Golden Valley," said Cecil, "and the woods on the far side are Copshot Bank....When Leslie and I were little, we used to love to watch the men playing cricket down the field there, because one saw them hit the ball and then a few seconds later we heard the smack of the bat on leather. It proved something or other, and we were frightfully conceited about it."
"I know," said Lady Cora sympathetically. "Physics-whatever they are. No pursuit for a gentleman."
Even in Barsetshire, physics are there.
