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A Month in the Country

This is Carr's fifth novel and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The novel won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1980 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year.

The story is set around the church in the village of Oxgodby in 1920. Osgodby or Osgoodby is an area near Thirsk in Yorkshire. The church is based on St Faith's church at Newton, sometimes called Newton in the Willows, near Kettering. This is the abandoned church that Carr tried to save from demolition, now used as Newton Field Centre (although it may now have closed). The Kettering Evening Telegraph reported on 28th November 1994, that JLC had left the sum of £1,000 in his will for a stained glass window to St Faith to be placed in Kettering Parish Church.

Carr wrote on a price list that he sent to a friend in about 1987 that the book had been bought for a film by Dennis Potter. Potter did not write a film script for the novel, it was written by Simon Gray.

The novel was made into a film in 1987 starring Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh and Natasha Richardson. The part of Kathy Ellerbeck in the film was played by Vicki Arundale, which seems to have been her only acting performance. The film was shot at St. Mary's Church, in Radnage in Buckinghamshire. According to a letter from Carr to his sister, the production cost £1.3 million, which was recovered.

The novel was initially dedicated to Carr's sister, Kathie (Kathleen). In the fine, limited edition, published in 1991 by the Cornucopia Press, he added a dedication to Sally, his wife, who had died in 1981. He retained these dedications in the Quince Tree Press edition, published in 1991.

One of several manuscripts, according to Carr, is in the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York.

The Folio Society edition was planned during Carr's life time but wasn't published until 1999, so is not included here.

(Last updated on 9/8/2022)

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Front panel and (unfaded) spine of the book dust jacket

The essence of the past is encapsulated within the interior of the church, and, uncovering the sacred wall painting, he rediscovers the rhythms of life, past and present which the war had obliterated. J.L. Carr creates a special world of illusive experience that exerts a haunting atmosphere of nostalgia.

Rear fold-in: J.L. Carr is a publisher of standard poets, idiosyncratic maps, and unlikely dictionaries. He is also author children's books and novels, including The Harpole Report (Secker and Warburg, 1972), How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup (London Magazine Editions, 1975), and The Green Children of the Woods (Macmillan, 1976).

Notes: This is the fifth publisher that Carr had used. Carr wrote in an article in The Author in 1983:

A Month in the Country was bought by a chap from Harvester who telephoned asking if I had a novel for sale. Quite astonishing! Never neglect to answer phone calls. Probably his was the only firm who would have taken it on because creative atrophy had set in badly and I ran out of steam at 35,000 words".

The Harvester Press was established in Brighton by Prof. John Spiers (b 1941) in about 1968, although a publisher in the same town had used the same name in 1918, according to JISC. The last publication of the Press is dated 1985. The company was sold to Simon & Schuster in 1988.

The church pictured on the jacket is St Materiana's Church in Tintagel, Cornwall.

Inscriptions

This is Carr's inscription in a copy of the novel that he gave to his sister Kathie, to whom the book is dedicated:

One can't write a novel 'out of thin air'. Anyway, I can't. I had to furnish a story with the past. And this is true of A Month in the Country. One can't put a finger exactly on who this is or where that was because the people are like other people and the places are here and there. The narrator isn't me; Kathy Ellerbeck isn't you, the church is in Northamptonshire, the monument to Laetitia is in another church, the vicarage is in Essex . . . and so on. But the feeling is true ‐ and it is an affectionate look back at a lost time, even perhaps a time that never was. Lloyd

Carr wrote this in a copy sent to a friend in Ireland:

This novel was an attempt to recall my childhood in the North Riding in the early 1920s. We lived like the Ellerbecks. To this was tacked on a period in the 1960s when, with Sally and Bob, I looked after an abandoned medieval church, like Oxgodby’s, alone in the fields, And the W.W.1 came from weekly conversations with Edmund Kirby, aged 98, who barely survived the Somme.

In a letter to his sister, Kathie, JLC wrote:

They are going to publish a school edition with notes (so at last I shall discover what it's all about).

No school edition is known.

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Front cover

Carr wrote inside a copy of this book:

This novel is the final spasm of a withering creative energy and I had to fall back on long slabs of memory. The Ellerbeck household is the 1920 Carr household, even the choosing of the chapel organ, the dying girl, the Sunday school treat are true. And, when I was 18, my father sent me to 'Ferry' to preach. So, in some ways, it is an exercise in nostalgia, memories of days that probably never were.

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Notes: Carr changed the dedication to this edition by adding the name of his wife, Sally, who had died in 1981. Carr said that he 'revised' the text, but as far as I can tell he only made one change.

The scene depicted in the wall painting of the church at Oxgodby in the first and second editions of the novel and in the Isis Large Print edition is described as "the three lords of Matthew 5" (First edition, MC 37) and later, on page 52 of these editions, Birkin says "I was working up the three brothers (see Matt. V)". This scene is based on the painting at St Peter’s Church at Raunds in Northamptonshire of the three quick and the three dead which also appears in the church at Ferry Farthingale in The Harpole Report.

According to Rogers (2003), Carr received a letter from a vicar who was bewildered at this reference to the Christian gospel of St Matthew. This may have stung Carr, who perhaps prided himself on his knowledge of the Bible, and he changed the reference to Luke 16 for the limited edition and all subsequent editions (MC page 28). Luke Chapter 16 is the Parable of the Unjust Steward, which also does not seem to be applicable to the story depicted on the wall.

As far as I can tell, this is the only book published by the Cornucopia Press and one of few titles printed by the September Press, all between 1984 and 1989 at Wellingborough. The address of the Cornucopia Press is the same as the bookshop, Heywood Hill. An obituary in July 2020 for Raymond John Carter, a former Labour MP and bibliophile, states that he was responsible for publishing this book. If you have any more information, please let me know.

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Carr's order form for his edition of the title (click to enlarge).

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Front panel and spine of dust jacket

In a tent in the next field lives Moon, also a war survivor, whose days are spent in search of a lost grave. Both are shadows of the men they once were. The hero's developing relationship with Moon lays the foundations for the deep sense of communication he is to experience with the country landscape, and with the landscape of the past. The essence of the past is encapsulated within the interior of the church and, uncovering the sacred wall painting, he rediscovers the rhythms of life, past and present, which the war had obliterated.

Rear fold-in: Winner of Britain's Guardian prize for fiction, A Month in the Country is a quiet masterpiece. Between the covers of this little book lies some of the finest and most moving writing of the decade.

Notes: The book was reviewed in The New Yorker by Molly Panter-Downes in the issue of May 7, 1984 (pages 152-158). A quote was used on the front cover of the paperback edition, below.

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Front cover of variant edition

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More information about later impressions and foreign language editions can be found on the Wikipedia page for this novel (which I update).