A Winter Away - Elizabeth Fair

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Résumé :
My last secretary was thirty-five, old M. said gloomily, and no more sense than a child of ten. Or else she wasn't all there. You all there? he asked suddenly, giving Maud a searching look. No banging your head on the table? No throwing the china at me? Hey?


Young Maud has made her escape from an overbearing stepmother and come to stay with her cousin Alice and Alice's companion Miss Conway in the countryside. Alice and Con have arranged a job for her as secretary to Mr Feniston, an eccentric and intimidating neighbor who seems to have driven his previous secretary to a nervous breakdown.


In between cataloguing Mr Feniston's library, dodging his temper, and encounters, awkward and intriguing in turn, with his son and an alienated nephew, Maud finds herself involved with local eccentricities and dramas, including a secret romance which has everyone talking. She may never be the same after this winter away!


Furrowed Middlebrow is delighted to make available, for the first time in over half a century, all six of Elizabeth Fair's irresistible comedies of domestic life. These new editions all feature an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.


Miss Fair's understanding is deeper than Mrs. Thirkell's and her humour is untouched by snobbishness; she is much nearer to Trollope, grand master in these matters.--Stevie Smith


Miss Fair makes writing look very easy, and that is the measure of her creative ability.--Compton Mackenzie

Biographie:
Elizabeth Mary Fair was born in 1908 and brought up in Haigh, a small village in Lancashire, England. There her father was the land agent for Haigh Hall, then occupied by the Earl of Crawford and Balcorres, and there she and her sister were educated by a governess. After her father's death, in 1934, Miss Fair and her mother and sister removed to a small house with a large garden in the New Forest in Hampshire. From 1939 to 1944, she was an ambulance driver in the Civil Defence Corps, serving at Southampton, England; in 1944 she joined the British Red Cross and went overseas as a Welfare Officer, during which time she served in Belgium, India, and Ceylon.
Miss Fair's first novel, Bramton Wick, was published in 1952 and received with enthusiastic acclaim as 'perfect light reading with a dash of lemon in it . . .' by Time and Tide. Between the years 1953 and 1960, five further novels followed: Landscape in Sunlight, The Native Heath, Seaview House, A Winter Away, and The Mingham Air. All are characterized by their English countryside settings and their shrewd and witty study of human nature.
Elizabeth Fair died in 1997.