A Sheaf of Corn

Mann spent her life in Norfolk, married to a farmer at Shropham, and the best of this 1908 Methuen collection comes straight out of that world. In “Women o’ Dulditch,” Dinah Brome is the village woman with no reputation left to lose, and she is also the only one willing to nurse the dying wife of the man who spends his idle hours in her kitchen. The rest of the book ranges well beyond the village: a boy leaving a Harley Street consulting room, a tea-shop assistant, a music mistress, a stranger in a cottage hospital, a honeymoon at Brighton, a curate writing to a friend about how his foolishness ended. Nineteen stories in all, comic in places and cold in others, most of them about respectable people and what their households cost them.