Country Moods and Tenses: A Non-Grammarian's Chapbook

Description

'. . . let the townsman say what he will, country life has more variety . . .'A contemporary of Cecil Beaton, Siegfried Sassoon and Rex Whistler, Edith Olivier is best known for her first book, the novella, The Love Child but was the author of a variety of both fiction and non-fiction, as well as becoming the mayor of Wilton, Wiltshire, in 1939.In this biographical memoir, written during the Second World War and subtitled 'A Non-Grammarian's Chapbook', Olivier takes the five grammatical moods - infinitive, imperative, indicative, subjunctive and conditional - and uses them to describe village and country life in her beloved Wiltshire as it was in 1941, the year of first publication. Covering a range of topics - from the folklore and traditions of the local area, to the weather and landscape itself - Country Moods and Tenses captures a moment and describes a world which has, in many ways, been lost to us.

Edith Olivier (1872-1948) was born in the Rectory at Wilton, Wiltshire, in the late 1870s. Her father was Rector there and later Canon of Salisbury. She came from an old Huguenot family which had been living in England for several generations, and was one of a family of ten children. She was educated at home until she won a scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford. Her first novel, The Love Child, was published in 1927 and there followed four works of fiction: As Far as Jane's Grandmother's (1928), The Triumphant Footman (1930), Dwarf's Blood (1930) and The Seraphim Room (1932). Her works of non-fiction were The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden (1934), Mary Magdalen (1934), Country Moods and Tenses (1941), Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (1945), Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1945), her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley (1938) and, posthumously published, Wiltshire (1951). Edith Olivier spent her life within twenty miles of her childhood home, and died in her beloved Wilton in 1948.