Rural Life Fiction

Rural life is the bread and butter of many a classic novel. There’s Jane Austen’s Emma, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and the village of St Mary Mead in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries, and many more besides. Today there are still many writers finding inspiration for their fiction in the countryside.

If you love reading about people taking a break from the city, of small-town hospitality or prejudices, second chances, living the bucolic dream and anything else that can happen while wearing a pair of gumboots, then these are the books for you.

Authors making their name in rural life fiction include New Zealand’s own Danielle Hawkins. When It All Went to Custard considers the effects of divorce on a family, the potential to lose the family farm as well as a second chance at happiness – all told with Hawkins’s characteristic wit and empathy. In Take Two there’s Laura dealing with a farm, a bookshop, small children and a whole raft of family issues. These are the latest two novels by Hawkins whose writing career began with Dinner at Rose’s.

Rebecca Shaw found inspiration for her Tales from Turnham Malpas series in the Dorset village where she lived. There are nineteen novels set in this gossipy English village, beginning with The New Rector, in which a newly arrived pastor must deal with an assortment of minor catastrophes and behaviours. More dilemmas emerge as the series progresses, as newcomers arrive inspiring curiosity. This is cosy, comfort reading at its best, still popular and in print ten years after the author’s death.

Gervase Phinn similarly writes about the Yorkshire Dales in his Little Village School series where gossip and romance are in the air. A former school inspector, Phinn originally penned a series of Dales memoirs about his experiences, sometimes worrying, sometimes amusing, with the kids stealing the limelight. The novels are equally warm, funny and poignant.

And let’s not forget Miss Read, famous for her Thrush Green and Fairacre novels. Miss Read (in real life Dora Saint) published her first Fairacre novel, Village School, in 1955, and continued to write over thirty more stories chronicling rural life in the post-war years until she retired in 1996. Many of these books are still in print and popular in libraries.

Katie Fforde is a popular author whose novels frequently take her heroines into the country. Often these are stories about second chances or follow women trying their hand at being their own boss. There’s Fran in A Country Escape learning to be a farmer; or three friends running a vintage wedding business in the Cotswolds in A Vintage Wedding; antiques are the theme in A French Affair when Gina and Sally inherit a stall at an antiques centre in the English countryside. These are delightful feel-good reads full of warmth and romance.

Independent women frequently turn up in the novels of Australian author Rosalie Ham. There’s Neralie Mackintosh in The Year of the Farmer - a woman who returns to a small country town to run the pub. Or Tilly, who comes home to the town from which she was banished to see her mother and ends up setting up a dressmaking business in The Dressmaker, which also became a film starring Kate Winslet.

Literary fiction turns up a fair few rural stories. Take Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground where fifty-one-year-olds twin, Jeanie and Julius, have to adapt when their mother dies, and their isolated cottage is no longer their home - an engrossing rural noir story with a strong emotional pull. Or Andrew Miller’s Booker shortlisted, The Land in Winter, about two couples struggling with secrets through a terrible winter in the countryside near Bristol. Then there’s The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig, a witty, dark and suspenseful novel about a couple who can’t afford to divorce in London, so they downsize and move their family to rural Devon.

Almost in a genre all her own, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels follow the musings and relationships of an elderly country pastor in a small Iowa town. The first book is a kind of letter to his son, a young boy who he doubts he’ll see grow up. It’s beautifully written and brings in the stories of the town, John Ames’s father’s chequered history and the difficulties brought home by the Depression and war. Other characters tell their stories in further books with the series having something of the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird.

There are doubtless many more novels that fit the rural life fiction genre. What they have in common is a grounding in a country setting - evoking the smells, sights and sounds of the world beyond the city limits, and the people who live there, whether seasoned country folk who can adapt to whatever nature throws at them or incomers looking for a fresh start. Find more in this sub-genre by checking the catalogue under Country Life -- Fiction.

Posted by JAM

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