Bess of the Woods

A gamekeeper's daughter in eighteenth-century Sussex, a squire's son, a smuggling gang and a wood that hides all of them. Warwick Deeping wrote seventy novels and this early one is his most physical: the fights and the flights are staged with a real sense of ground. The class barrier is the plot and the book does not pretend it can be argued away. Fifty-nine paintings by Constable, Clausen and others follow the wood, the field and the changing sky through the same Sussex ground the story walks.