Dear Literal and Spiritual Farm Dwellers,
Finally, the much-promised edition of Off Topic about books set on prairies or farms. If I owned a bookshop, I would set up one of those lovely browsing tables dedicated to this genre, or maybe even have some formal signage directing people to it on the shelves - doesn’t ordering shelves alphabetically feel like the very least enticing option? It works for people shopping with a specific quest, but somehow doesn’t suit a leisurely browser nearly so well (although filing in any other way would require the bookseller to be familiar with the themes of every single book in the shop).
It comes as a total surprise to me that I love this genre so much - my paternal grandparents ran a farm for most of my childhood and there were very few things I embraced about that: I chose to become a vegetarian at the age of four1, was terrified of the farm dogs, and didn’t like muddy fields or the sinister sound of gunshots in the fields behind the farmhouse that woke us on Sunday mornings. But as an adult, I find the day-to-day of farm life oddly compelling to read about - there’s something about living with the seasons and nature that has a rhythm I enjoy, and the struggle to grow enough food to survive seems like a drama stripped back to its simplest form: there is just the uncertainty of weather, pests, health, and the ability to work harmoniously within a community of very few people. This is both reassuringly predictable (bad weather will come, but spring will always follow) and unique (this place, that year, those people); each story is the same but different.
I trace my love of Farm Lit (sorry - that term just sort of tripped off my fingertips onto the screen 🙈!) back to my early twenties when I came across a non-fiction book called Urban Dreams, Rural Realities about a couple who uprooted themselves from the city to attempt to live self-sufficiently on their own smallholding. I can’t remember much about it, other than that it was light and quite funny, and that I lent it to a friend from our antenatal class who’d just moved to a house at the bottom of a very bumpy farm track and she said it ended up being an inspiration for how she and her husband set up their lives there. 2
There may have been some forgotten farmery in between, but the next book I remember reading that falls into this category was eight years later in 2009, when I picked out Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell, a novel set on a prairie in 1930s Northern Canada. It’s a quietly brutal book (if you’re in need of a cheery read, please don’t skim over those words), relentless in its gruelling depiction of one family’s struggle to make the land work for them and the tensions underlying that, but I felt totally invested in their lives and it stayed with me long after I’d finished reading - it’s always been on my list of books I want to read again.
A few years later, my sister edited a memoir, The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball, following Kristin’s adventure after she gives up her (vegetarian) city life as a freelance travel writer, to join her future husband in starting a community farming project in Upstate New York - it’s excellent on the mental shift this required, as well as the backbreaking day-to-day of farming, the life and death of their animals, balancing the finances of a relatively small 500-acre farm (they use horses rather than expensive machinery), and introducing the reader to the friends and neighbours who pitch in. It’s extremely graphic in the killing/cooking animals department, but that seems necessary in a farming memoir where Kristin is new to both of those things. I devoured The Dirty Life, and then devoured my sister’s descriptions of her visit to Kristin’s farm the following year (if choosing between the two non-fiction books, definitely this one). Kristin wrote a follow-up, published in 2020, which is on my TBR pile.
Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures somehow feels like it fits in here. Despite its lack of farm or prairie, it has a similar physicality and grittiness, being set on the Dorset coast in the 1820s as fossil-hunter, Mary Anning, chips away at both a cliff and societal conventions, in a time when men were often credited for her work, and the discovery of certain fossils brought an unwelcome challenge to a creationist belief system. In many ways it's quite a dry book and I think the title, Remarkable Creatures, is as much a reference to the women and their lack of conventional charm, as to the fossilised creatures they dug up - but it's also what makes the book feel so genuine and true - I loved it, and them. (For clarity, this is a fictionalised version of Mary Anning’s life).
When my son was seven or eight, I gave him a book called Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life. In truth, it was really a gift for myself, but thankfully he liked it too, and we spent hours poring over Julia Rothman’s illustrations. It’s wonderfully factual, but also reminds me of the Richard Scarry books from my own childhood, because in Farm Anatomy you can spend hours choosing your favourite weathervane, breed of pig, variety of apple, even type of quilt (in the US and Canada, feedsack quilts, made from the patterned cotton sacks that grain/sugar/animal feed were packed in, were massively popular and the much-loved Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt book grew out of this. See also, The Farmer's Wife Homestead Medallion Quilt: Letters From a 1910's Pioneer Woman and the 121 Blocks That Tell Her Story).
Now to the wilds of Alaska, for The Snow Child, which I think was a gift from my husband about eight years ago - my memory of it isn't crystal clear (actually, it’s not even vaguely clear - more, so thick with sediment that I can only really remember the atmosphere and landscape of it), but I do recall it being a solid four stars, despite the fact that I don’t often like books where the bounds between what’s real and imagined are blurred.
Moving on, I listened to The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah as an audio book one weekend last February while temporarily blinded (trying a new eye cream can be a dangerous sport, and no, I didn’t put it in my eyes; I just seem to have very porous lids and it then worked itself into a migraine by way of diffusion. Luckily a good friend left some GF cookie dough on my doorstep that could be put straight into the oven and eaten warm, so my memory of that time is infused with that wonderful taste sensation and the story of The Four Winds; it was not entirely bad).
Anyway, similar to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Four Winds is set in the 1930s Dust Bowl era, a time when drought struck the southern plains of America, leaving over-cultivated soil with nothing to hold it in place, meaning that when the winds came, the earth simply blew away and covered over everything in its path. Thousands of small farms were devastated - I’d had no idea quite how catastrophic this was, but it was capable of burying whole cars. The story follows one family’s struggle for survival and is quite an epic at over fifteen hours long, although I didn't wish for it to be any shorter. I didn’t know much about that time or how poorly migrant families were treated within their own country, so it was eye-opening (although totally different in feel and style, it made me think of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, in that I kept imagining things couldn’t get any worse, but then they did - I think A Fine Balance is one of my Top Ten books3, despite the sadness of it).
Shortly after The Four Winds, I listened to an abridged version of James Rebanks’ English Pastoral on Radio 4 (no longer available, hence the link to Amazon instead) and when I heard James talking about how our farmland in the UK is so overworked that soil erosion has become a critical issue, I was shocked to realise how little we’ve learned from history and that we’ve continued with a system that pushes farmers to mistreat their land unless they’re in a position to survive running at a loss. I realise I’ve mashed a non-fiction english farming book with a US novel here, but read them both - sadly, they’re a perfect pairing. Although I’ve possibly failed to convey how beautifully-written James’ book is - it really is, so read it in its own right too. And also because he doesn’t just talk of crisis, but also of hope and salvation. And when I say they’re a perfect pairing, they are in my head, because of this small area of overlap, but in reality they’re probably not natural companions at all; they’re really nothing like each other.4
I recently read One For the Blackbird, One For the Crow by Olivia Hawker, after someone on Instagram recommended it to me (I’m so sorry I can’t remember who), and I just loved it. It’s marginally less bleak than Under This Unbroken Sky and has such wonderful characters - One For the Blackbird’s heroine has a really interesting rapport with her surroundings and nature, and the relationship between the two families forced into interdependency is brilliantly done. Olivia had a new book out last year, which is going straight onto my To Be Read pile (I have a feeling I will love anything she writes).
Another relatively recent read was Melissa Harrison’s latest novel, All Among the Barley, this time set in 1930s England. I love the way Melissa writes about nature, although the ending left me feeling a little flat. Nb. Melissa’s podcast, The Stubborn Light of Things, is really relaxing if you’re in more of a non-fiction listening sort of mood (trialling new eye cream optional).
While on nature writing, Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing was one of my favourite books of 2020 - set in the marshes of North Carolina, it’s a beautifully-written mystery (not a genre that would usually tempt me in) where the heroine, Kya, lives with a similar level of isolation and (enforced) self-sufficiency to the characters in many of the books I’ve mentioned above. Delia’s descriptions of the landscape are lengthy and wonderful and I spent quite a bit of time online, researching the marshy setting (it’s really rare for me to undertake any kind of novel-related enquiry, so is testament to quite how ready I was to sink into its pages). Also, a brilliantly twisty ending.
Finally, a viewing recommendation. When my friend Shauna told me about Jeremy Clarkson’s Amazon series, Clarkson’s Farm, I was sceptical, but her recommendations are always good so I settled down to watch as Jeremy set out on a year attempting to run the Cotswolds farm he owns (prompted by the retirement of his farm manager). At times, Jeremy delights in a man-child act that’s hard to watch, but as it goes on, he becomes increasingly aware of how impossible it is to make a reliable living as a farmer, and how the modern-day methods they’re pushed towards are harming the environment, and it all becomes a bit more serious. And he’s really the ideal person to have these realisations on screen - if a figure like Alan Titchmarsh or Monty Don were to share them it would be expected, but for someone as brash and unenvironmentally-minded as Clarkson to reveal this carries extra weight and reaches a wider audience. By the end of the year he seems subtly changed as a person and my overriding feeling was what an incredible thing he’d done for the farming industry in making the programme. Thoroughly and unexpectedly recommended.
Please do let me know if you have any of your own recommendations in this department - I’d love to hear.
With love, thanks for reading, and very best agricultural wishes,
Florence x
Perhaps a little wilful at four-years-old, but in my defence, until my mum learned to drive, I was primed for it while waiting at the bus-stop home from town directly next to an abattoir where I would watch the lorries of animals being driven in - I remember being devastated when I realised what was about to happen, and used to sit weeping over my uneaten sausages in an empty lunch hall, long after my classmates had been let out to play (it was 1981, when vegetarianism wasn’t yet commonplace). Childhood just seems to be filled with traumas like this - I’m so relieved to be an adult. This entire newsletter may seem perversely pro-farming for a vegetarian (and although I still eat eggs, I’m increasingly choosing vegan alternatives to dairy too), so here’s a few things that might make sense of it: most of these books revolve around self-sufficiency and small-scale farming, where animal life tends to be more revered and a death is usually more humane and well-appreciated - this approach still doesn’t make me personally want to eat meat, but I’m happy to embrace it as a choice others might want to make, although of course, it’s the bits about crops that I really love reading about. In more general terms, I’m also increasingly aware that without farms and grazing animals, much of the UK’s lush green landscape would be at risk of development, which is its own disaster, so although it’s at odds with my own beliefs, I’m actually quite philosophical about farming.
I always wonder how things I read twenty years ago will have aged, both in the context of time and my own changing tastes as a reader, although I still love many of the authors I liked then - Mary Lawson, Maggie O’Farrell, Mark Haddon, Ian McEwan - so I hope the others have fared well, but really, who knows.
Which makes me think how much I’d love to write a newsletter on Top Ten Favourite Books Ever, although can you imagine how long it would take to narrow down the selection - it’s like the very best and worst of challenges.
Can you tell that for a moment I was wavering under the weight of making recommendations - one’s head is an idiosyncratic place and my own internal barometer for ‘this goes with that’ may well not align with yours: I think macaroni cheese and Little Gem lettuce are a perfect pairing; ditto cashmere and muddy walks (nothing will keep you warmer); and a man wearing a suit with Converse/Vans might just be one of my favourite things…there is simply no accounting for our different tastes and the ways in which you might find my recommendations displeasing if you were to try them - I kind of just want to put out a pre-written apology with each and every one of them, just in case. Wishing you a lovely weekend, Florence x
Please track down a copy of 'Letters of A Woman Homesteader' by Elinore Pruitt Stewart - a wonderful first-person account of life in Burnt Fork, Wyoming in 1909. And I highly recommend Ivan Doig's 'The Whistling Season" set in Montana around the same time. These are two terrific books. What a great post Florence - I loved 'The Dirty Life', 'Good Husbandry" and so many of the books you have mentioned.
You might want to take a look at ‘My Antonia’ by Willa Cather (1918). It is seen as a classic pioneer story set on the prairies of Nebraska.