Miss Clare Remembers / Emily Davis

In the English village of Fairacre, the retired schoolteachers Dolly Clare and Emily Davis enjoyed a remarkable friendship, as this moving volume reveals. Childhood playmates in Beech Green, they would remain close throughout their long lives, eventually sharing a cottage in their retirement. They felt grief when a village family was lost on the Titanic. They each experienced young love and then heartbreak when the First World War interrupted both of their romances. The triumphs and tragedies of their days are depicted with all the humor, heartbreak, and human warmth for which Miss Read is known, providing a sensitive portrait of life in the country.

Miss Read is the pseudonym of Mrs. Dora Saint, a former schoolteacher beloved for her novels of English rural life, especially those set in the fictional villages of Thrush Green and Fairacre. The first of these, Village School, was published in 1955, and Miss Read continued to write until her retirement in 1996. In the 1998, she was awarded an MBE, or Member of the Order of the British Empire, for her services to literature. She lives in Berkshire.