Forest Silver: A Lake District Story: 23

'Far below, through the moonlit wood, the lake was visible again and the Island in it. Dim, like a phantom ship, it lay in the silver waters and from the nearer end of it shone a narrow rectangle of light… so dull and red and smoky looking that it seemed sinister in the bodiless and blanched moonshine.'

A novel rich in the period culture of the Lake District, Forest Silver unfolds a story of village life unsettled with the arrival of evacuees during the Second World War. Wing-Commander Richard Blunt, recovering from a life-changing injury, comes into the orbit of the enigmatic and headstrong Corys de Bainrigg in a tale of love, longing and facing up to reality, with the ghost of wartime trauma ever an unwelcome guest.

First published in 1941, Forest Silver is an important work of Lake District fiction, in which E M Ward evokes her environment with pitch-perfect authenticity.