Why are allusions to nature so compelling in fiction? Thomas Hardy’s inconstant ‘terrestrial conditions’ in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Winston and Julia’s escape from Big Brother to make love in the countryside in 1984, the sea holding Charles Arrowby to account in Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the abandoned, tangled (and then reclaimed and flourishing) depths of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s secret garden.

In these examples alone, nature represents variously mankind’s fallibility and changeability, our desire for freedom and individual expression, sought for or accidental self-contemplation and the impact on ourselves and others of nourishment or neglect. Concepts we’re perfectly capable of debating internally, but the natural world allows for great exploration of, by setting up a mirror for us to see inside our souls more clearly.

Why? Because it’s bigger than us and lends perspective? Each of us stood, like Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ‘upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly’. Because it’s varied and complex, offering conformation bias of our own view of our complicated emotional landscape? Because, whatever our religious views, it prompts us to come face to face with our ‘maker’?

If urban backdrops in fiction allow, through the implied constant proximity of others and layered (and necessary) social structures, an author to consider the fizz of human interactions, like water molecules gaining energy due to an increase in temperature, the use of nature takes the Chemistry lesson containers away. But a character is not in isolation by being set away from the throng, if anything they become more grounded, more rooted, more connected, more conscious.

However vast, multidimensional or omniscient, employing nature as a touch point, or as a player in its own right, antagonistic, harmonious or indifferent, in the plot, is a device so universally employed in fiction it really comes down to an author’s choice as to depth of description that sets one work apart from another. Delia Owens’ skill in Where The Crawdads Sing, in which we invest in the marsh as much as in ‘The Marsh Girl’ Kya, is both a testament to her former career as a nature writer and an obvious extension of it.

It's pleasing, for the amateur etymologist, that the word pastoral means both a work of literature depicting country life (albeit in idealised fashion) and the giving of spiritual advice. Employing nature in fiction is to bring in an element of the mystical, and the elements themselves in all their brutal, beautiful and baffling glory. It is, as Hardy writes a ‘grand feat of stagery’, and whether nature is rendered as ‘quiet objects’ or is ‘raging loud’, we’re equally beguiled.