Ronald Blythe: ‘Just a voice for his time’

Abstract Ronald Blythe is often seen as Britain’s finest living rural writer. He has published over thirty books, some of them, like Akenfield and The View in Winter, widely acknowledged as classics, inspiring a film and follow-up books by others. His literary output has been extraordinary: novels, short stories, poetry, rural documentary writing, oral history, ‘parish’ writing, religious books, his own autobiographical work (among a remarkable milieu of creative people), and historical studies ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. He has also edited a great range of authors and types of writing. Ronald Blythe is especially an East Anglian author, writing about that English region, in whose work the local and the religious are often to the fore. As this famous author approaches one hundred years of age, this article is a forthright academic appreciation of his work, a discussion of its themes and impressive variety, and an analysis of the meanings and importance of his writing to modern readerships.