My Year of Reading Miss Read

See those books there, just on the left? The orange ones? I am going to read all of them this year, you mark my words.

I read my first Miss Read book when I was 13 or 14, I think, and found a copy of Village School in my school library. I was struck by the quaint cover and, having grown up a townie, was fascinated with the idea of village life. Also, it was pretty short.

And I kind of fell in love with it a bit. It was a funny portrait of village life in the 1950s but was in no way sentimental. The story included frank depictions of poverty and didn't shy away from the realities of life at that time. It was also written during a period when village schools, the sort with only one or two teachers presiding over as many classrooms, still existed. I went on to read a few more and found them all to be entertaining slices of social commentary.

Narrated by the Fairacre village schoolmistress, the fictional 'Miss Read', the first book was a considerable success when it first appeared in 1955 and the author went on to write twenty volumes in the series ending with the suitably titled A Peaceful Retirement in 1996. She also wrote a dozen or so novels set in nearby Thrush Green, a few standalone novels, two volumes of memoir and a cookery book.

Miss Read was actually Dora Saint, a schoolteacher by profession who wrote for Punch as well as scripts for BBC radio before turning to novels. Her writing career spanned over fifty years and she died only last year at the grand old age of 98.

I appear to have accumulated all of her books over the years so have set myself the challenge of reading the whole bloody lot of them by the end of 2013. I am led to believe that they get a bit more twee as time goes on but I reckon I can last the course. I shall report back on my progress.

Comments

[Sarah Salway]

Oh I loved these too, makes me feel nostalgic. Interesting how short so many books of that period were.