by Lois Lamplugh. Hardback, The Exmoor Press, 1991; second revised edition, Foreword by Richard Williamson, illustrated.
Book condition: as new, with dust wrapper.
This unauthorised biography proved a useful introduction to the life of Henry Williamson in the years before the appearance in 1995 of Anne Williamson's definitive biography, Henry Williamson: Tarka and the Last Romantic; and remains so, despite some gaps (the First World War is scarcely covered) and inaccuracies.
The publisher's blurb to this second revised edtion reads: 'Who was Henry Williamson? Sometimes referred to simply as the author of Tarka the Otter, he published some fifty books – not only other novels and collections of stories about animals, birds and countryside, but two long novel sequences, the four volume The Flax of Dream and the fifteen volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.
'A self-styled chameleon, he was a complex character. Perpetually haunted by his experiences in the First World War, he possessed a personality distinguished by contradictions and contrasts. A joyful man, he could often be profoundly unhappy. Prone to make enemies, he could be a loyal friend. A talkative and gregarious man, he frequently sought solitude, and eventually became very lonely. A jester, sometimes a buffoon, he was also an intensely serious artist.
'Lois Lamplugh, who grew up in the north Devon village of Georgeham, where Henry Williamson wrote not only the first half dozen of his novels and a large number of nature stories, but also the many novels of his later years, here offers a perceptive exploration of the life of this mercurial, volatile and restless writer, whose love and knowledge of the natural world, and of Devon, irradiates his work. Enthusiastically received on its first publication in 1990, this is the revised, second edition of what is destined to become the standard work on Williamson, the man and the writer.'