Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

This post actually appeared as a comment on my post on 1970s pony literature. I enjoyed it so much I felt it was a shame it was buried in the comments. It deserves to be read, so here it is, and many thanks to Laura for writing it. I hope you don't mind being moved to a starring role! I'm now a university lecturer in English Literature, though struggled with reading from about the age of 9 through to 13. Patricia Leitch's books kept me reading and thinking during that time and, most importantly, they kept alive in me the notion of a life of the imagination. The book that I loved most was Dream of Fair Horses, which I still reread.... it is really a book about what it means to have relationships that aren't driven by possessiveness. One of the rather melancholy aspects of Patricia Leitch's work that I think I sensed as a child, but that I see much more clearly now, is her anxiety about what it means to be live as an adult woman. The books sometimes seem to...