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  Crocker's Hole - From their pens...

  R D Blackmore

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  Richard Doddridge Blackmore was born on 7th June, 1825 at Longworth in Berkshire (now part of Oxfordshire), where his father, John Blackmore, was Curate-in-charge of the parish. His mother died a few months after his birth the victim of an outbreak of typhus. With this loss the family moved to Bushey, Hertfordshire, then on to their native Devon.  His elder brother Richard (by a year), however, was taken by his aunt to live near Oxford. His father married again in 1831, whereupon Richard returned to live with them.  With much of his childhood spent in the lush and pastoral "Doone Country" of Exmoor, and along the Badgworthy Water, Blackmore came to love the very countryside he immortalised in Lorna Doone.  In November 1853 he married his wife Lucy.  And the following year, 1854, his literary career began with a collection of Poems and for the next 15 years he would write in the winters and garden in the summers.  In 1860 with inherited money he built a house in Teddington just outside of London and established a market garden for the cultivation of fruit.  He loved horticulture but having little business experience could never really exploit it.  However with the publication of Lorna Doone in 1869 he was catapulted to fame.  And although he continued to write extensively nothing caught the public imagination quite like Lorna Doone.  RD Blackmore died at Teddington on 20th January, 1900 after a long and painful illness, and was buried next to his wife in Teddington cemetery.

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  Her Turn

  D H Lawrence

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  'Her Turn' was written by D H Lawrence in 1912. Lawrence is at his best in this story, taken from the scenes of his childhood and based on characters he knew intimately. The scene can hardly be called a story in the traditional sense, being the altercation between a miner and his wife over the sharing of strike pay.  Lawrence keeps the story light-hearted, almost comical but the tensions of married life in hard times are just below the surface.

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  Places Like These

  Lauren Carter

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  Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
  A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend's tricky family and her own confusing desires. A mother examines unresolved guilt while seeking her missing daughter in a city slum. A lover exploits his girlfriend's secrets for his own purposes. Whether in Ecuador or San Francisco, rural Ontario or northern Manitoba, the landscape in each of Carter's poignant short stories reflects each character's journey.
  Psychologically complex and astute, Places Like These plumbs the vast range of human reactions to those things which make us human—love, grief, friendship, betrayal, and the intertwined yet contrasting longing for connection and independence.

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  Eyes for the Blind - From their...

  Frederick Cowles

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  Frederick Ignatius Cowles was born in 1900 in Cambridge, England. 
  This unfamiliar name is one of the gems of English supernatural fiction as well as several other works of travelogues, history, folklore, and children's books.  
  When his supernatural short stories, and some are very short indeed, were first published they were compared to the works of M R James and EF Benson, yet unlike those two authors he fell, unfairly, into obscurity. 
  In all he wrote perhaps 60 short stories with weird and supernatural themes. 
  Frederick Cowles died in 1948 although some accounts offer that it was 1949.

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  A Rich Woman - From their pens...

  Katharine Tynan

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  Katharine Tynan was born on 23rd January 1859 into a large family in Clondalkin, County Dublin. 
  The family business was cattle rearing and the farmhouse, set with the mountains for a backdrop, was a wonderful world for a young mind to learn and imagine. 
  She was educated at the convent school, St Catherine of Sienna, in Drogheda.  A stubborn streak inhibited her ability to learn as easily as the school wished. However she did learn on her own terms and soon began to take her ‘forbidden literature’, hidden in her clothing, to her loft in a stable hideaway.  
  Until she turned seventeen nothing appeared to point to a literary career.  But some verse printed in a Dublin newspaper changed everything. It led to a sonnet being printed in the Spectator.  Thereafter the Graphic published several others and even paid a half guinea for the privilege.   
  In 1884 Katharine dispatched herself to London and made an abiding friendship in Alice Meynell.  Alice was an established poet and helped, with her husband Wilfred, to publish many poets. The following year it was arranged for the publication of her first poetry volume, ‘Louise de la Vallière’.  
  She formed valuable friendships with the poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats and later Francis Ledwidge.  
  As she gathered friends and contacts into her life her literary output began to gather pace. Katharine had begun to write prose for the Speaker and for the Scots and National Observer.  
  In 1892 she married Henry Albert Hinkson, a fellow writer and a barrister.  They moved to England and had five children although two were to tragically die in infancy.   
  By now her output was prolific and ranged from poetry to novels to short stories.  It would later include a biography and further extend to editing and reviewing.   
  In 1912 the family returned to Claremorris, County Mayo, when her husband was appointed magistrate, a post he held until his early death in 1919.     
  Tynan is sometimes grouped amongst the War Poets of the First World War. Her experience was not direct but as a Mother with one son serving in France and another in Palestine, the emotions, fears and doubts are expressed in a beautiful and heart-felt way.  
  Involved in the Irish Literary Revival, Tynan expressed concern for feminist causes, the poor, and the effects of World War I in her work. She also meditated on her Catholic faith. 
  She is said to have written over 100 novels, 12 collections of short stories, plays and many volumes of enduring poetry as well as five volumes of autobiography. 
  Katharine Tynan Hinkson died at age 72 on 2nd April 1931 in London and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

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  The Spirit of Romance

  Dmitrey Merezhkovsky

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  Dmitrey Merezhkovsky, a formidable historian and philosopher, known best for his epic narratives from Russian history, takes a romantic foray into the realm of life, death, love, and all things in between.

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