H.E. Bates Companion

London: Jonathan Cape, 1936 (May 7). Dedication: "to Rupert Hart-Davis [a director at the publishing firm]." New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936.

The third of four novels treating the changes affecting the English Midlands between 1880 and 1920 (preceded by The Fallow Land and The Poacher and followed by Spella Ho.) The book tells the story of a barmaid who marries into an established farming family, contends with the jealousy and condemnation of two sisters-in-law, has a tragic affair with her brother-in-law, and whose passionless marriage becomes unbearable when her husband returns wounded from the war. When family strife and economic forces finally bring the farm to bankruptcy, lacking a better option she returns to running a pub. Bates friend Bernard Harris, a Methodist clergyman who officiated at Bates's wedding in 1931, serves as the model for the minister in the novel.

David Garnett, writing in the New Statesman and Nation, called the work "the first of his novels which I should rank as a finished work of art above the best of his short stories." The New York Times however found the book more of "a series of separately framed pictures rather than a single broad canvas...This reader...wonders whether the long narrative form is not a strain upon his special talents." The Spectator referred to the book as "a powerful depressant...The book is to be read as a study in the moods of doom, and Mr. Bates exploits them to the full. There is lacking the high inevitability that would turn them into tragedy." Similarly, The Times calls it a work "of hates, resentments, frustrations, and decay, set against the author's accustomed backgrounds with much of his accustomed skill, but unable to escape the depressing nemesis of its basic or onyway final impulses." Geoffrey West says "Mr. Bates has always seemed a limited by developing writer...for the first time, his limitations have the effect of closing in upon him...It does seem that Mr. Bates is but doing excellently well what he has done excellently well before -- and in some respects perhaps done better."

Reviews:
Fortnightly (July 1936, p. 126, G.W. Stonier, attached)
John O'London's Weekly (May 16, 1936, p. 240, Richard Church, attached)
New York Herald Tribune (November 8, 1936, p. I7, Maurice Joy, attached)
New Statesman and Nation (May 9, 1936, p. 706, David Garnett, attached).
New York Times (November 1, 1936, p. BR6, Dorothea Kingsland, attached)
The Spectator (May 15, 1936, p. 900, Adrian Bell, attached)
The Times (May 8, 1936, p. 10, attached)
Times Literary Supplement (May 9, 1936, p. 397, Geoffrey West, attached)

Online Full Text at Hathi Trust Digital Library.