Short Fiction:
The Seekers, 1926
Day’s End, and Other Stories, 1928
Seven Tales and Alexander, 1929
The Black Boxer: Tales, 1932
Thirty Tales, 1934
The Woman Who Had Imagination, and Other Stories, 1934
Cut and Come Again: Fourteen Stories, 1935
Something Short and Sweet: Stories, 1937
Country Tales: Collected Short Stories, 1938
The Flying Goat: Stories, 1939
My Uncle Silas: Stories, 1939
The Beauty of the Dead, and Other Stories, 1940
The Greatest People in the World, and Other Stories, 1942
How Sleep the Brave, and Other Stories, 1943
The Bride Comes to Evensford, and Other Tales, 1943
Dear Life, 1949
Colonel Julian, and Other Stories, 1951
The Daffodil Sky, 1955
The Sleepless Moon, 1956
Death of a Huntsman: Four Short Novels, 1957 (pb. in U.S. as Summer in Salandar, 1957)
Sugar for the Horse, 1957
The Watercress Girl, and Other Stories, 1959
An Aspidistra in Babylon: Four Novellas, 1960 (pb. in U.S. as The Grapes of Paradise, 1960)
The Golden Oriole: Five Novellas, 1961
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, and Other Stories, 1961 (pb. in U.S. as The Enchantress, and Other Stories, 1961)
Seven by Five: Stories, 1926-1961, 1963 (pb. in U.S. as The Best of H. E. Bates, 1963)
The Fabulous Mrs. V., 1964
The Wedding Party, 1965
The Four Beauties, 1968
The Wild Cherry Tree, 1968
The Good Corn, and Other Stories, 1974
The Yellow Meads of Asphodel, 1976
Long Fiction:
The Two Sisters, 1926
Catherine Foster, 1929
Charlotte’s Row, 1931
The Fallow Land, 1932
The Poacher, 1935
A House of Women, 1936
Spella Ho, 1938
Fair Stood the Wind for France, 1944
The Cruise of the Breadwinner, 1946
The Purple Plain, 1947
Dear Life, 1949
The Jacaranda Tree, 1949
The Scarlet Sword, 1950
Love for Lydia, 1952
The Feast of July, 1954
The Nature of Love: Three Short Novels, 1954
The Sleepless Moon, 1956
Death of a Huntsman: Four Short Novels, 1957
The Darling Buds of May, 1958
A Breath of French Air, 1959
When the Green Woods Laugh, 1960
The Day of the Tortoise, 1961
A Crown of Wild Myrtle, 1962
Oh! To Be in England, 1963
A Moment in Time, 1964
The Distant Horns of Summer, 1967
A Little of What You Fancy, 1970
The Triple Echo, 1970
Drama:
The Last Bread, pb. 1926
The Day of Glory, pb. 1945
Nonfiction:
Through the Woods, 1936
Down the River, 1937
The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey, 1941
In the Heart of the Country, 1942
Country Life, 1943
O More than Happy Countryman, 1943
Edward Garnett, 1950
The Country of White Clover, 1952
The Face of England, 1952
The Vanished World: An Autobiography, 1969
The Blossoming World: An Autobiography, 1971
The World in Ripeness: An Autobiography, 1972
Herbert Ernest Bates was one of the most prolific British writers of the twentieth century. He published dozens of novels and novellas, but his reputation rests primarily on his first love: the short story. Bates was born in the Midlands shoemaking center of Rushden, England; both of his grandfathers had been shoemakers, and his father, a stern Methodist, owned his own shoemaking business. Yet as a young man Bates did not look upon the trade with fondness, and he tried to escape the factories through education. He was a good student, but not quite good enough to win a scholarship to the public school at Wellingborough. Bates was so discouraged by this early failure that he eventually forfeited an opportunity to attend Cambridge University and instead embarked on a series of odd jobs.
Bates stole time from one of these jobs, as a warehouseman, to write stories and poems. These early works were rejected by journal after journal until, in 1926, he finally had a novel published by Jonathan Cape. The book, The Two Sisters, received warm reviews but was not a financial success. In 1931, Bates married Marjorie Helen Cox and purchased a converted granary in Kent, where he lived with his wife and children until his death in 1974. To support himself and his family, he wrote more than one volume of fiction every year, in addition to producing reviews, essays, monographs on country life, and a column for The Spectator.
This massive output did not always bring critical or commercial success; indeed, for Bates the two seem almost to have been mutually exclusive. With only a few exceptions, his finest work in both the short story and the novel was written in the 1930’s. Fame did not come, however, until the 1940’s, when, under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X,” Bates wrote two collections of stories about the military air force. (The collections had been commissioned by the British Air Ministry.) During the next decade, Bates wrote a series of commercially successful novels set in World War II, of which the first, Fair Stood the Wind for France, became the best known. These novels were harshly reviewed by critics, who, ironically, tended to ignore the much finer efforts written in the same period (among them Dear Life, which may well be Bates’s most undervalued novel).
Bates was so embittered by the critics’ attacks that he more than once threatened to stop writing novels. Nevertheless, for the last two decades of his life his production continued unabated, and he even found two new genres in which to work, film scripts and novellas. Bates’s last major published work, the novella The Triple Echo, may well be his finest piece of fiction.
Bates is best known for his mastery of the familiar modernist short-story devices: indirection, psychological penetration of character, and an unadorned style. Not only do his finest stories demonstrate these characteristics but so, too, do such apparently atypical efforts as the often comical Uncle Silas tales. His novels are hardly daring technically but rely instead on a rich evocation of time and place–most frequently the Midlands of the early twentieth century–and a colorful cast of characters.
Regardless of the genre, setting, or characters involved, one theme appears repeatedly in Bates’s fiction: freedom versus constraint. Constraint comes in many forms, physical and spiritual, and includes poverty, religious fanaticism, class consciousness, government bureaucracy, and soulless urban sprawl. Freedom to Bates means individuality, sexual liberation, and, always, nature.
Bates’s reputation suffered after World War II. Out of economic necessity he wrote continually, but the aesthetic quality of what he wrote suffered. He repeated his themes, settings, and character types until they lost their effectiveness, especially in the novels. Even in his strongest genre, the short story, it can hardly be argued that Bates grew much after his achievements in the 1930’s. Those achievements are, however, distinctive enough to earn for Bates a place as a major figure in modern British literature.