User:Susiris

Elizabeth West

Writer of "Hovel In The Hills", published by Corgi in the UK (1970?).

Writer of "Garden In The Hills", originally published by Faber & Faber in the UK in 1980, and Corgi in the UK in 1981.

Writer of "A Patch in the Forest", first published by Logaston Press in 2001,

ISBN 1 873827 72 5

with drawings by Bernard Kear.

These are autobiographical accounts of her and husband Alans' pursuit of what is popularly known as "The Good Life", although the Wests both pre-date and ante-date the fictional BBC TV series, are not middle-class in a middle-class street, and do not keep livestock. The first two books are written of Hafod (possibly not its real name), at an altitude of a thousand feet, in North Wales, while "A Patch in the Forest" is of their life in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.

They are cheering books, with love at their heart, concerned with nature in its many aspects, animal, mineral, vegetable and neighbour; wind & weather, snow and sun, seeds, crops, pests, beaurocracy/idiocy. She is Nature, he is renewable technology ( well before wind farms ) and Method, except they overlap and compliment each other greatly. They do not disguise how much hard work must be required to make such a life work. They also imply, by hardly mentioning it, that a rock-solid relationship is one of the essentials.