Our Village

Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, John Constable and James Arthur O'Connor. A village in Berkshire, walked over and written down: the cricket match, the cottage gardens, the poor woman with her geese, the lanes in each of the four seasons. Mitford's father gambled away three fortunes, including the £20,000 lottery prize she won at ten, and she wrote these sketches to keep the roof on — which is not the impression they give. Everything since about the English village comes out of this book. Sixty plates range from Constable and Turner to a 1665 portrait of Mitford herself, gathering the English parish and its weather as her sketches do.