Ronald Blythe

Richard Cobbold , son of Elizabeth Cobbold , and rector of Wortham, published a fictionalised treatment of MC 's life in 1845 entitled The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl. It was...

Ronald Blythe wrote in a foreword to the eventual publication: Rarely has the cadence and the intelligence of the four generations which lived through these years been caught to accurately or so movingly.Elspeth Huxley

Reviews were gratifying (talent, wrote Ronald Blythe , was too mild a word), and the novel won the Guardian Fiction Prize and (like its predecessor) was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Giles Gordon had suggested she write a village book of the genre of Jan Myrdal's Report from a Chinese Village or Ronald Blythe 's Akenside. She would need, he said, to impose a...