The second Fairacre novel introduces us to more of the village characters with each chapter representing a month in the village calendar. Our narrator, Miss Read, relates all the village happenings with good humour, even when it involves the fact that the villagers are trying to marry her off or sheâs battling with her miserable cleaner at the school. Gentle, feel-good reading.
In her first book VILLAGE SCHOOL Miss Read gave a picture of the small but detailed world of a typical primary school in a remote country area, a world peopled by the children themselves, Miss Clare the venerable infants teacher, glum Mrs Pringle the cleaner, the vicar and other inhabitants of Fairacre. In VILLAGE DIARY Miss Read describes the people of Fairacre with the same exactitude, sense of comedy and sharp observation.
In addition to those characters familiar to readers of VILLAGE SCHOOL there are newcomers, including dictatorial Amy, an old college friend, Mr Mawne, whom the village sees as a possible husband for the unwilling Miss Read, and the earnest new infants teacher. Overshadowing everything, there is the mammoth country pageant in which Fairacre is so sharply and painfully divided...
Miss Read, or in real life Dora Saint, was born 17 April 1913. A teacher by profession, she started writing after the Second World War for Punch and other journals and as a scriptwriter for the BBC. She is the author of many immensely popular books, including two autobiographical works, but it is for her novels of English rural life for which she is best known. The first of these, Village School, was published in 1955 and Miss Read continued to write about the fictitious villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green until her retirement in 1996. She lives in Berkshire, and in the 1998 New Year Honours list was awarded an MBE for her services to literature. She died in April 2012.
