Fascinating read 7/10

The Great War Magazine, September 2016

I have read your manuscript with fascination, delight and awe. I knew of its existence and was familiar with some of the material [but] most of it is a revelation. And I so admire the imagination, ingenuity and determination with which you went about your quest, as well as the warmth and sympathy with which it is written. How fortunate for Aldington scholarship that it was YOU who moved into Malthouse Cottage - and that you did so WHEN you did. . . . The most fascinating aspect of it for me is the revelation that Aldington is a novelist in the Thomas Hardy mould - particularly in 'The Colonel's Daughter', 'Women Must Work' and some of the stories. I can't think of any other novelist whose work is so closely modeled on people, places and events around him. How interesting to discover that even a character like 'Coz' is taken from life.' . . . One of my favourite chapters is 'The Village'. I really liked the way you used Jessie Capper's journal to structure that chapter. I got such a strong sense of the village as it was - and of your own love of it. And the way you follow Aldington and T S Eliot's walk in the third chapter had already given me a strong 'visual' sense of the place. . . . There is so much warmth and humour in your story - and some lovely anecdotes.

Vivien Whelpton, author of Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover 1911-1929 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2013