The Visitors: The Stories of Ronald Blythe

by Ronald Blythe

Stories of rural England tell of a widow moving back to London to live with her elderly father, a young man who returns from India to his country house, and a spinster who sees a dragon in the rain

239 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1985

About the author

Ronald Blythe CBE was one of the UK's greatest living writers. His work, which won countless awards, includes Akenfield (a Penguin 20th-Century Classic and a feature film), Private Words, Field Work, Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends and numerous other titles. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006. In 2017, he was appointed CBE for services to literature

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"These stories belong mainly to the first years of my writing life, when I seemed to be reading and writing and thinking about short stories much of the time. They all incorporate what I saw and heard around me from childhood on, even the ghost stories, for as a boy I lived within walking distance of Borley Rectory, later to be owned by my old friends James and Catherine Turner, and of M. R. James's house at Aldeburgh. My interest was not in ghosts but in the personality of those who saw them. The village stories are drawn from my grandparents' Suffolk, a wonderful, hard, rural world where gossip became tale -- even poetry. Some of the stories are about the effect of isolation on the usually strong-minded people who never quite manage to fit themselves into the local conventions."
~~Introduction

These stories all seem to have been written at an angle -- 30 degrees off kilter, sometimes even more. Most are vignettes, leaving the reader to wonder what the point was .. or was there a point? Perhaps it was just a snapshot .. a moment caught in time, and preserved like a daguerreotype.