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"Villages England Fiction"
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The plague stones
Londoners Paul and Tricia Feenan move to the isolated Holiwell village where Tricia has inherited a property. In the village, there are centuries-old stones used during the Great Plague as boundary markers. No plague-sufferer was allowed to pass the stones and enter the village. The plague diminished, and the village survived unscathed. An ancient ceremony is performed each year to renew the village boundaries. A miguided act by the Feenans' son then reminds the village there's a reason traditions have been rigidly stuck to.
Book
Cranford
The women of an English country village star in this Victorian classic that inspired a BBC series, from the author of North and South.
Welcome to Cranford, where everyone knows one another and a cow wears pajamas. It's a community built on friendship and kindness, where women hold court and most of the houses—and men—are rarely seen. Two colorful spinster sisters at the heart of Cranford, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah Jenkyns, are daughters of the former rector, and when they're not playing cards or drinking tea, they're feeding an endless appetite for scandal and weathering commotions to their peaceful lives, from financial troubles to thieves to an unexpected face from the past.
First published in installments in Household Words, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens, Cranford was a hit of its time and today offers modern readers a glimpse into a small English town during the mid-nineteenth century.
eBook
Harvest
A remote English village wakes on the morning after harvest, looking forward to enjoying a hard-earned day of rest and feasting. But two mysterious columns of smoke mar the sky, raising alarm and suspicion.
Book
A drop of water from a stagnant pool? Inter-war detective fiction and the rural community
Detective fiction has been little considered by historians of the British inter-war village. This is despite the phenomenal publishing and sales in this literary genre. Agatha Christie is the bestselling writer of books of all time, and millions of people world-wide have learnt about English villages by reading her. This article discusses why inter-war fiction is instructive to social historians. It concentrates on the so-called 'Golden Age' of this fiction: notably the authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and G. K. Chesterton. The subject is approached through a number of themes, which address the genre, county house settings, the nature and morphology of the detected village, representations of villagers and the poor, the literary detectives (notably Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey) and their relation to village life, the local role of gossip, depictions of the clergy, the fictional uses of material culture, senses of the past, the detection of 'evil' and issues of inter-war village renewal. A binding strand throughout is how the English village community is handled and interpreted in this fiction. The article argues that the detective genre is important and highly revealing to social and rural historians, and deserves extended analysis.
Journal Article
Lanny : a novel
\"Not far from London, there is a village. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to those who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England's mysterious past and its confounding present. It belongs to Mad Pete, the grizzled artist. To ancient Peggy, gossiping at her gate. To families dead for generations, and to those who have only recently moved here. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort who has woken from his slumber in the woods. Dead Papa Toothwort, who is listening to them all. Chimerical, audacious, strange and wonderful - a song to difference and imagination, to friendship, youth and love, Lanny is the globally anticipated new novel from Max Porter.\"--Publisher's description.
Book
Yorkshire Lasses and Their Lads: Sexuality, Sexual Customs, and Gender Antagonisms in Anglo-American Working-Class Culture
Fiction and historical tests carefully positioned in Anglo- American historiography provide new perspectives on the elusive world of female working-class sexuality. Working women are portrayed, not as victims or objects, but as active players in gender and class conflicts. Yorkshire lasses and older women used their sexuality to define their female adulthood through sexual experimentation during courtship, to discipline male aggressiveness and patriarchy, and to advance their status as working women. These antagonisms included sexually charged customs and behaviors, such as the ritual of \"sunning\": the sexual humiliation of young men by working women, and new meanings for female agency in premarital sexual activities. The behaviors and customs of Yorkshire working-class women reveal their uses of individual and collective activities to confront on their own terms both gender and class conflicts in the family, the workplace, and the trade union. The threatening power of female sexuality exercised collectively, openly, and dramatically was a reminder to all that the private world of sexuality and the workplace were deeply intertwined but not always at the expense of women.
Journal Article
Reservoir 13
\"Midwinter in an English village. A teenage girl has gone missing. Everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on what is usually a place of peace. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done ... As the seasons unfold and the search for the missing girl goes on, there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together and those who break apart\"--Amazon.com.
BOOK
It's raining men
\"Best friends May, Lara and Clare are desperate for a holiday. They have been dreaming of a little cottage in the middle of nowhere, long walks in the country and just a bit of time away from it all. But when they arrive in Ren Dullem, a small Yorkshire seaside town, it seems it is not the place they thought it was ... May can't wait to get away from men after being cruelly deceived. Then in Dullem she falls hook line and sinker at first glance for one of the inhabitants - but he's already taken ... Lara is living with James and his awful step-children who taunt her with tales of his younger, prettier ex whom they adored - the woman who Lara walks in to find James in bed with despite all his protestations that he wouldn't touch her again with a barge pole. Reeling from the hurt, she needs the sea air of Dullem to heal her. What she doesn't need is to be constantly in battle with the owner of the holiday cottage - a man who is every bit as bitter and resentful and untrusting of the other sex as she is. Clare's kind, steady boyfriend Lud wants her to go and live abroad with him for two years, but she's just been offered the promotion of a lifetime. It gives her the excuse she needs to end the relationship and find some single excitement which happens to turn up in the form of a very bad boy who is everything Lud isn't - impulsive, wild and dangerous. Will this holiday be the break they all need? Or will the odd little town with all its secrets bring them all to breaking point?\"--Publisher.
