The Hurly Burly and Other Stories

January 1, 2021
These 15 short stories from a respected, if not widely known, English writer who died in 1957 penetrate the outwardly simple existence of an assortment of inhabitants of rural Britain to produce sophisticated depictions of their inner lives. Even the slightest of Coppard's tales exude a strong sense of place while some of the longer ones possess an almost novelistic scope. In the latter category are stories like "The Handsome Lady," which movingly depicts the life of a man torn between his duty to his invalid wife and his love for another woman. "Ring the Bells of Heaven" traces the career of Blandford Febery, who leaves his family's farm on a Suffolk heath to become first an actor and then a revivalist preacher before experiencing a crisis of faith. In "The Higgler," an itinerant peddler lives to regret an imprudent romantic choice that alters his life forever. Coppard neither creates rustic stereotypes nor condescends to his characters, consistently capturing their essences in a few economical brush strokes. That's true of Phillip Repton, from the O. Henry-esque story "Fifty Pounds," a writer who finds that his projects "insolvently withered, and morning, noon, and evening brought his manuscripts back as unwanted as snow in summer," or Molly Wickham, in "The Wife of Ted Wickham," who is "sound as a roach and sweet as an apple tree in bloom." A house with windows that would "often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed to burn like a box of contained and smokeless fire" is but one of the many striking settings Coppard sketches in sharp, vivid detail. Though the details of his characters' daily routines may seem alien to modern sensibilities, their emotional struggles are instantly recognizable and memorably evoked. A collection of perceptive portraits of life in rural England at the turn of the 20th century.

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