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Chaffinch's |
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Paperback
book, 198 x 128 mm, 256 pages |
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H W Freeman
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Published
2001
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Price £6.99
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ISBN
1-903366-18-6 |
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Coming from a family dispossessed from the land by the
19th century Enclosure Acts, Joss Elvin craves to be an independent
farmer. This
novel follows his mixed fortunes on 'Chaffinch's',
the small Suffolk farm that he finds derelict and reclaims.
The story
runs from 1884 to 1938, reflecting the momentous changes in the agriculture
of the time. It is also a personal story, an account
of marrying and raising a family on nineteen acres.
H W Freeman's
own passionate desire for direct and continuous contact with the
land illuminates every page of this novel, first
published in 1941 when it was a Book Society recommendation.
"In Freeman's work we find an absorbed interest in fact … he
writes with simplicity and warmth" – Glen Cavaliero,
The Rural Tradition in the English Novel.
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The cover, 'Man Hedging', was painted by Harry
Becker, born in 1865 at Colchester, Essex, the son of a German
doctor.
He
studied in Antwerp under Charles Verlat and in the atelier
of Carolus Duran in Paris. He began exhibiting with the Royal
Academy in 1886, after his return to Colchester. |
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Freeman’s identity
card for the University of Florence Overseas Cultural Centre,
probably August 1929, when he knew that Joseph had sold over
50,000 copies in the United States (and Holt’s had
paid a cheque for £2,200). Down in the Valley had just
been accepted for publication in the UK and the United States. |
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Walking and cycling in Europe were among Harold
Freeman’s greatest pleasures, an enthusiasm shared by
his wife Elisabeth. Freeman’s memorable account of a
walk through Italy in Hester and her Family (1935) must have
been based on a real journey. |
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Freeman was in Pamplona
at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, an experience he
used as the basis of the third section of Andrew to the Lions
(1938). This uninscribed photograph in which Freeman is wearing
a big Spanish beret or boina appears to belong to that period. |
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