The Pathway

Description

The Pathway is the fourth and concluding volume in Henry Williamson's Flax of Dream sequence. Willie Maddison fought in the First World War, and suffered fully its tragedies. Now he returns to his beloved Devon, to the wind-swept Taw estuary, with its swift alternation of sun and rain, its bird-filled saltmarshes and marram-covered sandhills. He comes here to live out, and try to express in writing, insights that have taken shape from his boyhood and wartime experience. The Flax of Dream is a masterpiece. The four novels that comprise it have been reissued in Faber Finds: The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days, The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway.

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.'