While following the plough

the long version

The Worm Forgives the Plough is one of the few indisputable masterpieces of rural literature written in this century. It is a deceptively simple account of the author's experiences working on the land during the 1940s, a time when many of the old ways and practices still survived, but were rapidly disappearing before the pressures of technology and progress. As Collis himself wrote, "This is about the last book of its kind that can now be written in England." Collis' descriptions of country people, their life and work are minutely exact, humorous and unsentimental. But Collis imbues his story with paradoxes, with digressions, and with a wider vision, so that the book is ultimately transfigured into poetry. Life as it was then lived on the land is never glorified, but we are left with the overwhelming sense that its values were truer and its rewards deeper than anything which economic progress has given us.