Buried Treasure: DJ Taylor
AE Coppard's 'Dusky Ruth and other stories'
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.I bought my Penguin paperback of this "best of" selection in Blackwell's, Oxford, in 1980: 19 stories culled from half-a-dozen collections published in the Twenties. Coppard (1878 - 1957) was one of those tenacious autodidacts who arrive at a career in literature through a kind of intuition and whose grasp on the human situations that catch their interest is wholly unforced. The two "rural writers" to whom he is most often compared are Hardy and HE Bates, but he has none of the former's cosmic vengeance or the latter's sentimentality. Though any amount of bad things happen, none is strictly classifiable as tragedy: Coppard's philosophy is a shoulder-shrugging, sympathetic "That's how it is". Doris Lessing, who met him 50 years ago, noted "a sparrow's eye view, sharp, wry, surviving, and not one who can quarrel with the savage economies of the field of the hedgerow". One day there will be a Coppard revival, and it will start with Dusky Ruth's centrepiece, "The Higgler", 30 sparsely written pages about a rural love affair that might have been, and one of the best short stories in the language.
DJ Taylor's life of Orwell has won the Whitbread Biography Award
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments