Widows Abound
Deborah Valenze: Scenes of Rural Life, 5 June 2025
The Social Topography of a Rural Community: Scenes of Labouring Life in 17th-Century England
by Steve Hindle.
Oxford, 472 pp., £100, June 2023,978 0 19 286846 6 Show More
by Steve Hindle.
Oxford, 472 pp., £100, June 2023,
“... In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams described the powerful attraction many people feel for the ‘knowable community’ of the rural past. We hope to find in such places, he wrote, a prelapsarian refuge from the world of today. One such refuge could be found in the novels of George Eliot, which are populated by cottagers, carpenters, farmers’ wives, lacklustre clergymen and Methodist preachers ... ”