Our Village Volume 1

Considered by many of her contemporaries to be a writer and playwright without rival, Mary Russell Mitford is chiefly remembered today for her remarkable series of prose sketches of rural life which began to appear by installment in The Lady’s Magazine shortly after
her removal, sometime around 1820, to a labourer’s cottage in the village of Three Mile Cross in Berkshire. They were instant bestsellers. According to The Times, there wasn’t “a household in the whole country that was not talking about these stories.”  Intellectual, witty,
broad-minded and even unshockable, Mitford, whose unruly and reckless father gambled away her fortune almost until his death in 1842, was a true daughter of the eighteenth century. A feast for anyone with a passion for flora and fauna, several of these essays are reprinted here for the first time in over one hundred and fifty years.