The Notebook of a Nature-lover

by Henry Williamson

Overview

The Notebook of a Nature-lover recalls Devon as it was some eighty years ago. This enchanting anthology was originally written as a regular column for the Sunday Referee, and reflects Henry Williamson’s unique ability to communicate his understanding of and his passion for the English countryside, whether it be observing salmon and sea-trout leaping in the River Bray (his classic tale of Salar the Salmon was written during this same period), watching partridges in his field and a spider in its web, walking on Dartmoor and Exmoor, or tales of his young children exploring the natural world around them.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) is best remembered today for his much-loved Tarka the Otter and his other nature stories – The Old Stag, The Lone Swallows and The Peregrine’s Saga among them. A farmer during the Second World War, he recounted his experiences in The Story of a Norfolk Farm and in four collections of his journalism collected and published posthumously by the Henry Williamson Society (available as e-books): Chronicles of a Norfolk Farmer (1937-1939), Heart of England (1939-1941), Green Fields and Pavements (1941-1944) and A Breath of Country Air (1944-1946). After the war he returned to North Devon where, between 1951 an 1969, he wrote his major work, the semi-autobiographical 15-volume novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045292337
Publisher:	Henry Williamson
Publication date:	09/18/2013
Series:	Henry Williamson Collections , #12
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895.Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy.He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka.His writing falls into clear groups:1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird.2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 1914–1918, both in England and on the Western Front.3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books.Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson’s achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full.The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.