Sitting stoned on a hill above his village, a young man muses on his place in the world. Connor is proud to have fenced pastures while his mates have been away at university. But it’s overwhelming to think of all their lives being equally real and urgent. Are they part of the same story or separate ones? A phrase comes to him from a book he hated at school: something about “the roar on the other side of silence”. In this fine, subtle and strange novel from one of the most probing writers of contemporary rural life, Melissa Harrison earns that nod to George Eliot, whose words she gives to an anxious and ecstatic labourer clutching a can of Fanta.

The Given World follows the inhabitants of one village in a river valley, a place “as old as anywhere”, for six months between the equinoxes of a year. The time is now, or an imminent future when the seasons seem to have “ceased their metronome”. At first, the central figure appears to be Clare, who knows each flagstone of the ancient priory that has been the centre of her life. The six months are her dying time, from diagnosis to last thoughts. But, in a way that pays tribute to the solitary Clare’s understanding of interconnectedness, the novel goes out from the priory to trace a web of lives. In the breezeblock bungalow next door, a desperate farmer tunes in at dawn to American evangelists on the radio. Like Saj the postman, we call at addresses where literary fiction rarely bothers to ring the bell.

Readers familiar with Harrison’s work will recognise this commitment to a kind of diverse group portraiture. All Among the Barley (2018) located us with absorbing immediacy in 1930s East Anglia, watching every member of an agricultural community through the heightened perceptions of an adolescent girl. Intensely private experiences were held in shifting relation to public politics and currents of international history.

The Given World presents another microcosm. The small particularities of its daily work are charged with a sense of cosmic change. This is concertedly a novel of, and for, an era of ecological crisis. Illegible omens light the sky; sleepers toss through “vast unsettled dreams”. Summer brings “strangled stasis”. We bear witness to an enigmatic leave-taking as a lone woman, like a late-walking ghost of Eliot on the Floss, looks down from a footbridge into the stream. The River Welm “sets about its final work”. With its omens and warnings, the novel comes close to a portentous tone that’s true to the times but can be flattening. I was glad of idiosyncratically wry moments. A last badger leaves the valley, “grey rump bouncing like a departing burglar captured on CCTV”.

The correspondence between Clare’s dying and the world’s dying is thankfully not laboured, but there’s congruity in the way the village’s capable women respond to the demands of these endings. Faye the death doula measures palliative drugs with expert hands. Five teas on the worktop signal, with welcome economy, the presence of women gathered to do what each can do.

It’s much to Harrison’s credit that this novel of strong feminist bearings should offer some of the most acute portrayals of working men I’ve found in recent fiction. Roy is a builder struck with vertigo while working on a roof. He mentions it to his builder’s mate of 20 years, except the mate is dead and Roy is alone, talking it over with himself. Having 5 Live on the truck radio gives some semblance of company. Can he no longer do his job? “Maybe this is it … Call it a day.”

Harrison has long been interested in what goes wrong when we sentimentalise the rural. The self-appointed “countryside correspondent” in All Among the Barley travestied the community she purported to revere in columns of honeyed prose about strong harvesters doing work “that purifies the spirit”. At Hawthorn Time (2015) included among its cast an amateur artist doing versions of the picturesque. Her breakthrough came by looking hard at what and who was actually there. Harrison, meanwhile, observed the resilient green spirit of an itinerant worker travelling between farms.

The Given World takes an epigraph from the painter and art critic Christopher Neve, a potent interpreter of “unquiet” landscapes: “The notion of country lends itself easily to sentimentality. In fact, it is never to be trifled with.” Harrison urges no trifling or generalising. For her, strikingly, ancient lores and superstitions are not to be taken lightly, either. They come down to us from people literate in the earth’s signs and alert to forces beyond immediate understanding. Harrison has drunk deep in the culture of the rural eerie, and the novel feels for the uncanny effects of environmental change.

For me the novel’s ecological seriousness has less to do with eeriness than with its spreading of narrative weight across many lives. No one gets to dominate; only the community’s most arrogant figure would want to do so. It’s a bold choice in a market hungry for redemptive plotlines, emotional journeys, standout characters. Refusing to prioritise any one inhabitant’s story, Harrison works towards a communal form. It’s made from distinctive personal idioms but strives for a voice that’s composite or impersonal. There’s no Greek chorus chanting us to a certain end. Instead: indefinable tensions, quiet griefs, makeshift tributes. The beam of narrative attention moves from the river rising, to a marriage breaking, to a man reading in a static caravan. This is the novel’s ethical work and its power. “Lit by chance” in a moment’s sun, a caterpillar bends itself into a series of hieroglyphic shapes, their meaning “impossible to ascertain”.

One hundred years of a unique literary rural life will be made available to readers and researchers after the British Library acquired the archive of Ronald Blythe.

The author of Akenfield, a globally bestselling account of a Suffolk village in the throes of the agricultural and social revolution at the end of the 1960s, lived and wrote in East Anglia until his death in 2023 at the age of 100.

As a former librarian who remained firmly in the pre-computer age, Blythe’s papers were found to be immaculately ordered – a million words or more, in neat writing, in humble school workbooks and on index cards.

Even so, curators estimate it will take a year to fully catalogue his archive and better understand the treasures hidden in his books, letters and cards.

“He was so orderly,” said Ian Collins, Blythe’s biographer and literary executor. “When people say ‘archive’ it’s usually another word for ‘muddle’ but with Ronnie you can tell it’s the product of an amazing, self-trained mind.”

Blythe was born in abject poverty, a Suffolk labourer’s son whose family slept on mattresses made of straw. He never went to school or university but taught himself, through reading and friendships with artistic, bohemian rural residents, particularly the artists John and Christine Nash. He published more than 40 books in his lifetime, including social history, fiction, poetry, rural nature writing and essays.

Helen Melody, the lead curator for contemporary literary and creative archives at the British Library, said: “We are delighted to have acquired Ronald Blythe’s archive, which will be a wonderful resource for Blythe scholars and those interested in the societal and cultural changes that Blythe’s work chronicled.”

According to Melody, the archive offers “an amazing insight into the century he lived through because he did a lot of reflecting backwards as well as thinking about contemporary events too”.

Blythe’s papers reveal the depths of his research for Akenfield, which tells the vivid and unvarnished story of a Suffolk village through the voices of its inhabitants, young and old. He writes to the Ministry of Agriculture to obtain records of the cows and geese kept in the village of Charsfield, his model for fictionalised Akenfield, while his index cards show he spoke to hundreds of people, seeking out everyone from otter hunters to commuters to create a kaleidoscopic and authentic account of rural life.

His notebooks show how his interviews were written up immediately afterwards, almost always from memory, according to Collins.

“He listened very, very attentively and he had this incredible memory because he’d been so watchful as a child, and he was very good at catching his interviewees’ voice,” said Collins. “All his books are true but it’s a deeper and broader truth than verbatim. That’s why Akenfield resonates because it’s not just 49 interviews from that period; it’s as though Thomas Hardy was interviewing them. Oral history tells us what people did; Ronnie tells us what people are.”

The archive reveals Blythe’s frugality, with the writer reusing index cards, and paper, and cramming as many neat words as possible into each cheap school notebook. Collins said his habits went to the heart of his “genius” as a writer, too. “It’s so neat because he knows that paper is precious, ink is precious and words are precious. Every word has to work so he’s constantly revisiting and honing it down to get the essence of it all. There’s no waste. He hates waste. You’d think that would make him into a puritan but we know from his life he wasn’t that at all – he was a hedonist.”

Blythe was a hermetic figure who lived alone on the Essex border for most of his life and held a sturdy Anglican faith but Collins’s biography revealed his sociability and uninhibited gay sex life, even in rural East Anglia in an era when homosexuality was outlawed.

This Blythe is found in the archive’s collection of letters from the American novelist Patricia Highsmith. “Ron” and “Pat” struck up an unlikely friendship and even slept with each other on one experimental occasion.

The archive includes letters from fans in the US, where Akenfield was a surprise bestseller, and the occasional critical note, such as a missive from the Earl of Stradbroke who criticised Blythe for the honesty of his depictions of the friction, exploitation and misery in neo-feudal relationships between lords, landowners and farm labourers.

“Those of us whose families have for generations cared for Suffolk are, I am sure you will understand, jealous that its good name should not be smirched,” wrote Stradbroke.

In a characteristically polite but steely reply, Blythe wrote: “Akenfield was never intended to be a public relations exercise for Suffolk but a statement about human nature in the context where I most understood it.”

Collins added: “Ronnie was endlessly kind, endlessly gentle and he’s endlessly tough.

“It’s an important archive for Britain. He was a humble person but he knew his worth and he always said his papers should go to the British Library. It’s such a rich archive, he is a writers’ writer but also the writer for every person – you can recommend Ronald Blythe to anybody.”

It may be too late for rural libraries to weather the IMLS storm

May 16 2025

Beth Anderson, director of the Burnsville Public Library in West Virginia, can throw a rock from the library’s front door and just about hit the interstate. While the mountainous region has historically been sparsely settled farm and coal country, Burnsville’s proximity to I-79 ensures that the library is a frequent stop for people just passing through.

More News Stories

Date and Time

August 22, 2024
1:30–3:00 p.m. ET

Additional upcoming webinars

• Cultural Strengths as Protection: Multimodal Findings Using a Community-Engaged Process: Sept. 11, 2024, 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
• NIH Women’s Health Roundtable: Maternal Mental Health Research: Sept. 16, 2024, 12:00–4:00 p.m. ET
• Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience for Mental Health in Individuals of Mexican Origin: Sept. 23, 2024, 1:30–3:00 p.m. ET

Overview

This webinar will present the goals and procedures of the Rural Engagement and Approaches For LGBTQ+ Mental Health (REALM)  study, which is developing a longitudinal cohort of diverse LGBTQ+ adults residing in rural and small metropolitan communities across the United States.

Employing a minority stress framework, REALM aims to determine the following: whether types of stigma, discrimination, and traumatic experiences vary across LGBTQ+ groups; how these exposures are associated with increased prevalence and incidence of depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts; and if and how proximal minority stress-related factors mediate and/or moderate these associations. Further, building on these findings, REALM will compare the relative acceptability of various technology-delivered intervention components for depression and suicide prevention for diverse rural LGBTQ+ communities.

Challenges with online recruitment and enrollment and creative solutions will be shared, in addition to lessons learned in how to ensure participant safety. The webinar will end with a description of the cohort to date and share preliminary baseline findings related to study aims.

About the speakers

Sarah M. Murray, Ph.D., M.S.P.H.

Assistant Professor
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Department of Mental Health

Sarah M. Murray (she/her) is a psychiatric epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at John Hopkins University. Her primary research interest is using mixed methods to understand the multifaceted relationship between violence, stigma, and common mental disorders to inform the development of effective strategies to promote the mental health and psychosocial well-being of individuals experiencing marginalization and/or living in situations of complex adversity in high-, middle- and low-income countries. Much of her research focuses on better understanding and measuring experiences of stigma among sexual and gender minority adults. As principal investigator of the REALM study, Dr, Murray seeks to better understand how these experiences may drive mental health disparities and what strengths-based and protective factors may contribute to positive mental health outcomes to inform intervention development.

Kirsten Siebach, M.S.W.

NIMH Global Mental Health T32 Doctoral Fellow
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Department of International Health

Kirsten Siebach (she/they) is a third year doctoral student in the International Health Department at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Kirsten’s research interests lie in the impact of the structural environment, including policies, laws, social attitudes, and norms, on mental health and psychosocial well-being, specifically among the LGBTQ+ community. Kirsten’s dissertation work will examine how structural stigma impacts LGBTQ+ adults living in the rural United States. Kirsten has a master’s degree in social work from the Boston College School of Social Work. She works with Mariah Valentine and clinician Gina Baily Herring to implement the mental health safety protocol for the REALM study.

Mariah Valentine-Graves, M.P.H.

Public Health Program Associate Emory University Rollins School of Public Health
Program, Research, Innovation in Sexual Minority Health (PRISM)

Mariah Valentine-Graves (she/her) received her bachelor’s degree in history and political science from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2013, followed by her Master of Public Health in behavioral science and health education from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in 2016. During her time at UCSD, she was involved in social justice work as an intern with both the UCSD LGBT Resource Center and the UCSD Women’s Center. During her time at Emory University, Mariah worked for two years as a graduate research assistant for the Women’s Interagency HIV Study at the Grady Infectious Disease Program. She has worked with PRISM Health as a public health program associate since 2016, coordinating the Engage[men]t Study, a cohort study of men living with HIV in Atlanta. She leads participant-facing activities in the REALM study including recruitment and retention of participants.

About the Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity Webinar Series

The Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity Webinar Series is designed for investigators conducting or interested in conducting research on mental health disparities, women’s mental health, minority mental health, and rural mental health.

Registration

This webinar is free, but registration is required .

Sponsored by

National Institute of Mental Health, Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity

Contact

For questions, please contact Beshaun Davis, Ph.D., Program Director, Mental Health of Minoritized Populations Research, Office for Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity