A note from the author: "All the characters in this novel are real
people, revived from the pages of Yorkshire history to enact again their
significant drama of love and strife, human strength and human weakness.
If I have sometimes deepened the lines, and supplied the gaps, of this
story of England's Civil War, from my own invention, that is the
novelist's privilege: to create a symbolic unity from scattered hints
and dispersed incidents."
In this novel of the English Civil War, Phyllis Bentley brings her
lightness of touch, and real human compassion, to one of the darkest
periods of English History.
Phyllis Bentley, 1894--1977 Bentley published her first work in 1918, a
collection of short stories entitled The World's Bane, after which she
published several poor-selling novels. The publication in March 1932 of
her best-known work, Inheritance, set against the background of the
development of the textile industry in the West Riding, received
widespread critical acclaim and ran through twenty-three impressions by
1946, making her the first successful English regional novelist since
Thomas Hardy and his Wessex. In 1949 she was awarded an honorary DLitt
from Leeds University; in 1958 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature; and in 1970 was awarded an OBE.
