The Country Habit: An Anthology

by Joanna Trollope (Editor)

For centuries the English lived on the land and even today, as cities encroach further and further on the remaining green fields and the number of working country villages dwindles, there is still a particularly powerful feeling for the countryside. This anthology, edited and introduced by novelist Joanna Trollope, spans the centuries and aims to evoke both the dream and the reality, from Anglo-Saxon laments to Tudor husbandry, and from Regency fetes-champetres to pre-war tennis parties. The extracts are drawn from private journals and letters as well as the work of writers such as Jane Austen, Laurie Lee, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Christopher Marlowe and William Wordsworth.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 1993

About the author

Joanna Trollope Potter Curteis (aka Caroline Harvey)

Joanna Trollope was born on 9 December 1943 in her grandfather's rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, England, daughter of Rosemary Hodson and Arthur George Cecil Trollope. She is the eldest of three siblings. She is a fifth-generation niece of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope and is a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls followed by St Hugh's College, Oxford. On 14 May 1966, she married the banker David Roger William Potter, they had two daughters, Antonia and Louise, and on 1983 they divorced. In 1985, she remarried to the television dramatist Ian Curteis, and became the stepmother of two stepsons; they divorced in 2001.

From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign Office. From 1967 to 1979, she was employed in a number of teaching posts before she became a writer full-time in 1980. Her novel Parson Harding's Daughter won in 1980 the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will start by saying I am a poetry novice and I really struggle with it - no disrespect I am just terrible with it. that now said on to the book.

I was rather disappointed with this to be honest - the book proudly states that it is a celebration of the English love of the countryside - yet the introduction pretty much goes on about how it idyllic image of the countryside never really existed for us - and as life gets more hectic and city centric we are moving ever further away from it. Having grown up in the countryside - I take a poor view on that sentiment especially in the first pages of a book celebrating it.

Then there is the poetry - it felt like the book had a huge amount of it which like I say some may love but I do not. I was expecting articles and testimonies about what it was like living and working in the countryside. But sadly there are very little.

In short this felt like a person wanting to talk about their love of the country but who in fact had a very limited or skewed experience of it. sadly not for me