Ronald Blythe - Career As A Writer

Career As A Writer

In 1960 Blythe published his first book, A Treasonable Growth, a novel set in the Suffolk countryside. His The Age of Illusion, a collection of essays exploring the social history of life in England between the wars, appeared in 1963. That book led to his being asked to edit a series of classics for the Penguin English Library, beginning with Jane Austen's Emma and continuing with work by Hazlitt, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. There were short stories and book reviews, and Blythe later prepared a number of anthologies, including The Pleasure of Diaries (1989) and Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War (1993).

In 1969 he published Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, a fictionalised account of life in a Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966. Blythe based his book on conversations with the people of the community in which he lived. "When I wrote Akenfield," Blythe said, "I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. And it vanished." The book is regarded as a classic of its type and was made into a film by Peter Hall in 1974. When the film was aired it attracted fifteen million viewers; Blythe made an appearance as the vicar. "I actually haven't worked on this land but I've seen the land ploughed by horses," Blythe told The Guardian in 2011. "So I have a feeling and understanding in that respect – of its glory and bitterness."

In the 1970s Blythe nursed John Nash in ill health. His book The View in Winter is a consideration of old age. In 1977 Blythe inherited Bottengoms Farm from Nash, who had bought the Elizabethan yeoman’s house in 1944. He later published a book, First Friends (1999), based on a trunk of letters he found in the house that recorded the friendship between the Nash brothers, John's future wife, Christine Külenthal, and the artist Dora Carrington.

His life at Bottengoms and the landscape around his home became the subject of Blythe's long-running column, Word from Wormingford, in the Church Times. These meditative reflections on literature, history, the Church of England, and the natural world were subsequently collected together in a number of books, including A Parish Year (1998) and A Year at Bottengoms Farm (2007). A compilation of his work, Aftermath: Selected Writings 1960-2010, appeared in 2010.

Blythe continues to live and work at Bottengoms. He never learned to drive and does not use a computer.