The Pinecone The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine--Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary

A thrilling portrait of Sara Losh, a forgotten architectural genius of the nineteenth century In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. Jenny Uglow's The Pineconetells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Losh combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower - there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs, and poppies; an arrow pierces the wall as if shot from a bow; a tortoise gargoyle launches itself into the air. And everywhere there are pinecones, her signature in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life, death, and rebirth. Losh's story is also that of her radical family - friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge; of the love between sisters, and the life of a village; of the struggle of weavers, the coming of railways, the findings of geology, and the fate of a young northern soldier in the Anglo-Afghan War. Above all, though, it is about the joy of making and the skill of unsung local craftsmen.

Jenny Uglow’s books include prizewinning biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and William Hogarth. The Lunar Men, published in 2002, was described by Richard Holmes as “an extraordinarily gripping account,” while Nature’s Engraver won the National Arts Writers Award for 2007. A Gambling Man was short-listed for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Uglow grew up in Cumbria and now lives in Canterbury, England.

Praise for The Lunar Men “An absolute wonder of a book, huge in its span and close in its detail, nothing less than a snapshot of what and who was best about Britain and its intellectual life in the middle of the eighteenth century.” —The Economist