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Reviews
On this page we post reviews for both the new edition of
The Blackthorn Winter and
a few contemporary reviews for the original 1930 edition. We begin with a
bizarrely comic review in the format of a poem that
appeared in Punch, or The London Charivari:
Walter,
the blacksmith, honest and slow,
Has Nancy, the
milkmaid, well in tow,
When suddenly upturns Gipsy
Mike
The sort of man that the
wenches like.
With his burning eyes that
pierce you through,
And lips that whisper and kiss
you too,
What can she do, struck all of
a heap?
Nancy
follows him like a sheep.
This in brief is the framework
which
PHILIPPA POWYS contrives to
enrich
With a wonderful wealth of
how's and why's,
Chiefly observed through Nancy’s eyes.
A sad little tale of a rustic
flame
That springs into life too
soon, its name
The Blackthorn Winter,
appears to fit,
Constable asks six bob for it.
~ Punch, or The London Charivari, July 16, 1930
‘If the first pages of The Blackthorn Winter seem unremarkable enough,
the Introduction will have given a foretaste of how unusual and original
a book it is. Not a difficult story to read, it is an easy story to
misread. Like her brother, John Cowper, Philippa Powys has a great sense
of drama. Her plot is dramatically simple, her dialogue spare, and the
visual beauty of The Blackthorn Winter has a cinematic quality ... Her
gypsies are not, like gypsies in most of the stories and paintings of
the time, particularly decorative or wholesome ... The story of Nancy
Mead is told proudly, directly, classically, and the teller offers no
verdicts’ – The Powys Society Newsletter, July 2007
‘The charm of the book
lies in its atmosphere – a heavy, slow, earthy atmosphere – and in the
power of the author to conjure up country sounds and scents and scenes
to such an extent that we almost cease to be readers and become
participants in the story.’ - Spectator, August 23, 1930
'The story is told in simple, direct narrative that moves steadily from
opening to close. It is a stark, poignant tale, clearly founded either
upon observed fact or on a tradition of a region in which the gypsies
have formed (if they do not still form) a more constant and integrated
part of the population than would commonly be the case in this country.'
-
New York Times, Aug 31, 1930
‘Few readers will
follow the fortunes of the driven ones of The Blackthorn Winter
without being reminded of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and her
country, of Wuthering Heights and its people.’ - Saturday
Review of Literature, October 11, 1930
FROM THE MARCH 2007 TLS REVIEW:
Philippa Powys
THE
BLACKTHORN
WINTER
208 pp. The Sundial Press. £19.50
ISBN:
0955152321
Ever since their arrival in Britain in the early sixteenth century,
gypsies have been regarded with both fear and fascination, the
former resulting in deportations, executions and discriminatory acts
of parliament and the latter, inspired by the writings of George
Borrow, in numerous works of literature, from Walter Scott and
Matthew Arnold to D. H. Lawrence and Sven Berlin. Charlotte Bronte’s
use of the gypsy motif in Jane Eyre suggested both the
excessive romanticizing and entrenched prejudices to which Victorian
society was prone. Over eighty years later, in 1930, Philippa Powys,
herself a product of the late Victorian era, revealed the currency
of similar attitudes in The Blackthorn Winter, the only one
of the several novels she wrote to have been published and now
reissued for the first time.
It
tells the story of a milkmaid, Nancy Mead, who finds herself torn
between the comfortable monotony of her daily life, typified by the
attentions of her dog-faithful blacksmith lover Walter, and the lure
of the imagination and new experience inspired by the arrival of a
young gypsy, Mike, with whom she decides to elope. But if this is
stereotypical romance it comes with a brutal edge, for the novel is
written with a passion and disillusionment that were characteristic
of the author’s own life (evoked in the striking oil portrait by her
sister Gertrude Powys that adorns the dust-jacket). What
sentimentality the novel has is constantly undercut by harsh
realities. As Glen Cavaliero notes in his Introduction, Philippa
Powys, a countrywoman born and bred, writes out of direct experience
of rural life for a readership that would recognize it, one respect
in which her work differs somewhat from that of her three prolific
literary brothers.
It
differs, too, in that words did not come naturally to her, and one
of the curious attractions of this novel is that the effort being
put into the very act of writing is at times almost tangible, albeit
resulting in a tendency to assert rather than imply the emotional
states of the characters. The novel has a naivety that lays it open
to other criticisms, yet it also induces a feeling that they are
hardly worth making, for there is an energy and wildness to this
work that are both distinctive and compelling, its numerous
memorable scenes vividly evoking the harsh and peripatetic gypsy
lifestyle of the period. The Blackthorn Winter is not a lost
Wuthering Heights, but will clearly engage the sympathetic
reader and be a fruitful source for studies of gypsy life and of
rural England in the inter-war years.
The
Times Literary Suplement
March
2, 2007,
No:
5422
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