Each time John has something to say about the inadequacies of the female brain or the female constitution is a time when the women in his life have done or said something sensible or have got John out of what seems to him a tricky situation.īlackmore’s prose was a definite change in style from Janice Galloway’s in my previous read. As that story progresses, it becomes clear that Blackmore is using John to take a rise out of men who think of women as inferior. But then there wouldn’t have been a story to tell. From his descriptions of them, all the women he knew seemed very sensible to me, and he would have got into fewer scrapes if he’d listened to them. He had some questionable thoughts about women, believing them to be like horses – lacking in, and better without, self-reliance – and also scolds, too prone to thinking themselves better than men. He seemed a good humoured sort, self-deprecating, solidly reliable. The story is narrated by John Ridd, a Somerset yeoman with a smattering of education. It diverted me from starting to read for an hour or so.

There was a mystery in the front of this 1900 edition, which I unravel here.

I bought a well loved copy of the 1900 edition, published not long after Blackmore’s death, from Withnail Books in Penrith.

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