The Dream of Fair Women

Description

This is the third novel in Henry Williamson's Flax of Dream sequence. Willie Maddison has returned from the Great War and chooses to live a recluse-like existence in a remote Devon cottage; he cares for injured animals and writes. This abruptly changes when Evelyn Fairfax enters his life. Their affair should have been therapeutic, helping to anaesthetize the horrors of war, but complications develop when Willie follows Evelyn back to Folkestone where she has a husband, a young daughter, many besotted admires, and a bad reputation. The four novels comprising the Flax of Dream sequence are: The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days, The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway. It has been said, 'together they must be regarded as one of the major works in English fiction of the day . . . in every respect a wonderful achievement.' Faber Finds is proud to be reissuing them.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, 'He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.'