My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a rare treat for all lovers of the countryside - for me an evocation of many happy times spent in my birth county of Kent and my love of wildlife and flora in all their guises.
Country gentlemen, bird-watching vicars and farmers have traditionally been the chroniclers of the British countryside. This wonderful book introduces a very different point of view. We see the changing seasons - and the 20th century revolution in the long-settled ways of rural life - through the sharp eyes of ten exceptional women including a leading suffragette, a classical scholar, an artist with her own large farm and a climber's daughter who turned to writing when her children grew up and left home. The suffragette leader Helena Swanwick, Gwen McBryde, whose husband died tragically within the first year of their marriage - and ran the lovely old farm of Dippersmoor Manor, Janet Case who taught Greek to Virginia Woolf and Katherine Arnold Foster, the toast of pre-first world war Cambridge undergraduates and lover of Rupert Brooke are amongst ten female diarists who lovingly record their surroundings with entries published in The Guardian over a period spanning from 1916 through 2007.
I loved it.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment