“She was looking for a man named Arch Wilson and she was walking south-westward, alone, towards the middle of the country, with another fifty or sixty miles to go.” So opens H. E. Bates’s Hardyesque novel, set in a nineteenth-century shoemaking village in the rural Midlands. A young woman, the simple and pretty Bella Ford, a chamber maid at a seaside hotel, is hoodwinked by the gifts and promises of one of the summer guests and falls pregnant. During an arduous journey in stormy weather, she miscarries and vows to kill the caddish Wilson for ruining her. Once she reaches Nenweald, the place he’d identified as home, he’s nowhere to be found. No one knows of him. Ben Wainwright, the town lamplighter, a former drunk who’s found religion, takes pity on Bella. He brings her home to his family, which conveniently includes three sons (Con, Jedd, and Matty) and their sister, Nell—all around Bella’s age. What follows is a tale of three young men more or less vying for Bella’s affection. A sense of inevitability—fatalism—prevails, a must in a novel after Hardy. One cannot alter what the gods have ordained. While there is some tension in the matter of whom Bella will settle on, the reader knows it’s not going to end well, especially with a character like Con, the intense and impulsive eldest Wainwright son, who can’t be stopped once set on a course.

There are some lovely descriptions of the natural world in the novel, and Bates’s depiction of Bella’s “reawakening” after trauma is sensitively rendered. However, the reader is also required to suspend disbelief. Winters are bleak in this village. There’s little employment to come by, and the Wainwrights live hand to mouth during the darkest months of the year. It’s hard to credit they’d willingly keep on a stranger—especially one who contributes little or nothing. They can barely make do as it is, and there’s the additional (perennial) problem of Wainwright Senior’s going on a sudden “blinder”—as Bates puts it. Bella is not a particularly interesting character. Aside from the opening and closing of the novel, she’s a passive character, demonstrating little agency. Her affections bend towards whichever Wainwright son happens to be closest at any given moment. Bella experiences no internal conflict as to whom she should choose, and for large sections of the book, her early statement of intent about Arch Wilson appears to be forgotten.

I liked the book well enough, but in spite of the many elements reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s later novels, the central character with her scant backstory and shallow interior life is not enough to compel. ( )