Her style and sensibility were thoroughly of her time and age and class, but her voice and her art are singularly incomparable. And I started Annals of the Parish expecting something like Scott, but very soon I was thinking, “This is like Jane Austen!” A friend and biographer of Byron, he was a contemporary of both Walter Scott and Jane Austen. The author, John Galt, born in Ayrshire in Scotland in 1779, was an ambitious entrepreneur who founded the city of Guelph in Canada an honest, generous, partly successful businessman and a prolific, uneven writer. A truly, undeservedly forgotten book, if perhaps not exactly a great one. Last spring, looking for a novel to read, any novel so long as it wasn’t a dystopia, I saw it and remembered I’d bought it ages ago in England, and never yet had read it.
For 30 or 40 years a book has been lurking on my shelves, a beautiful little Everyman’s Library edition published by Dent and Dutton, undated, with red fake leather binding and real gold leaf lettering and ornamentation on the spine and front cover: Annals of the Parish.
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