Fair Stood the Wind for France, first published in 1944, is author H. E. Bates' fictional account of a downed English bomber-pilot and his crew over occupied France during World War II. The men are taken in by a French family who hide them in their home. However, the pilot, injured during the plane's landing, must remain in France to heal, while his crew begin their journey back to friendly territory. The pilot falls in love with the home-owner's daughter, their relationship grows and eventually they travel together across France, seeking a way back to England. Fair Stood the Wind for France rises above the average romance, however. Set against the horrors of war, it takes on a life-affirming force, enhanced by the simple, yet elegant prose of the author. Bates also excels at evoking a sense of place; much of the story occurs over the course of a hot summer in rural France, and there are many beautiful descriptions of the French countryside as it bakes in the summer heat. In 1980, the book was the subject of a 4-part television mini-series by the BBC.

Reevaluates the accomplishments of the British writer within the context of major literary movements and cross-currents. It considers all areas of his work including his stories of country life; war stories and novels; his best work, Love for Lydia; and his highly acclaimed nonfiction on environmental issues.

Bates describes a single woodland year in this enchanting book.

The earliest of these stories, The Flame, was first published in 1926, having been written a year earlier, when I was twenty; the latest appeared in 1961. The intervening thirty-five years, together with the thirty-five stories I have chosen from that period, therefore give this collection its title, Seven by Five. My aim has been to make the book as widely representative of my work as a short story writer as possible, but I have nevertheless refrained from including any of the war-time stories I wrote under the pseudonym of 'Flying Officer X', any of the stories of Uncle Silas and any novellas, since these all belong, in my view, to quite separate categories. *The title of the British edition.

Short comic novel about an unconventional English farmer and his attempts to snare a husband for his daughter.

"If we set H. E. Bates's best tales against the best of Chekhov's," Graham Greene declared, "I do not believe it would be possible, with any conviction, to argue that the Russian was the finer artist." The sampler of H. E. Bates stories presented here shows the merit of that praise and displays the range and aspects of Bates's work from his first published story, "The Flame," to one of his very last, "The Song of the Wren." In his long and prolific literary career, Bates (1905-1974) produced twenty-five novels, a three-volume autobiography, nine books of essays, several plays and children's books, as well as his important and perhaps most enduring achievement, twenty-three collections of short stories. A Month by the Lake & Other Stories displays Bates's extraordinary talent for concisely getting at the heart of the matter. Whether he is dealing with romance in middle age (the title story), or the almost painful clarity of a child's world ("The Cowslip Field"), or encapsulating the disintegration and tragedy of a man and a house and the era and class they represent ("The Flag")-Bates's compassion for humanity remains constant. As Anthony Burgess remarks in his introduction, Bates "achieved such sovereignty of what literary land he inherited that he deserves the homage of our uncomplicated enjoyment... Bates's affection for ordinary people is one of his shining virtues. But he himself, as I knew, and as this compilation should make clear, was, is, far from ordinary." Book jacket.