Fenland Chronicle - Recollections of William Haney and Kate Edwards Collected and Edited By Their Daughter

London: Cambridge University Press, 1967. This from the dustwrapper: "Mrs Marshall is well known as the author of An Experiment in Education. One of the strengths of that book was her sense of belonging to her own region. Now she explores the sources of that strength. Here she transcribes the recollections of her parents in their own dialect. WiIliam Henry Edwards, her father, died in 1940, at the age of eighty. Mrs Edwards is still alive. Between them the Edwardses look back on a hundred years of life in the Fens. They speak in their own direct and vigorous way, richly figurative and often sardonically humorous, of the people and times they have known. The Fens are still markedly different from other parts of England, less accessible, less spoilt, and a little daunting to the outsider. The character of the land has produced its own way of life. Mr Edwards was by turns turf­cutter, boat-owner along the waterways, wind­mill proprietor, drainage superintendent and small farmer. So he and his wife saw each truly Fenland occupation from the inside: he as the worker, she as the housewife. They lived through a period when life was in many ways very harsh and circumscribed. Yet the life and the place produced a people of tough individu­ality, with an outlook and a speech of their own. The resulting book is as individual as the people. It is amusing and touching and continuously absorbing. Mrs Marshall opens a line to the past, and her book will go on the shelf beside Sturt and those other writers who chronicled the English people of their own region as they knew them." Illustrated with drawings by Ewart Oakshott 280 pages, 6.25 X 9.25 inches. Very good book a bit dustsoiled on the top edge, in a very good dustwrapper also a little dust marked.. First Edition. Illus. by Ewart Oakshott.