H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside. His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym "Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).
His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success. Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.
H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, and died in 1974.
The Nature of Love
by H. E. Bates
eBook
-
ISBN-13:
9781448215157
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Publication date: 02/11/2016
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 176
- File size: 2 MB
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The Nature of Love (Michael Joseph, 1953) was Bates's first published collection of novellas.
It contains three stories, different in weight but similar in texture, drawing from rural landscapes and the sensitive, poignant studies of the people that bring them to life.
Dulcima, dedicated to W. Somerset Maugham, is a tale of a simple girl in rural England whose manipulation of both an old widower and a young forest worker has tragic results. In 1971, EMI Productions released a film adaptation starring Carol White and John Mills.
The Grass God is a literary portrait of Fitzgerald, a landowner who is unfeeling in the treatment of his tenants and his wife, who, whilst bumbling through a summer affair with a young beauty, gets a taste of his own medicine.
Further afield, The Delicate Nature follows a young man to the Malaysian jungle to assist a plantation owner, but enters into an affair with his wife.
For the first time, this collection includes the bonus story 'Old Lady' which continues the retrospective theme and the dalliances of young romance.
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