Description
Book SynopsisIt has been said that one of the finest achievements of the Church of England was the maintenance of one well-educated man in every English community. Such a man was Richard Graves. He is best remembered as the author of The Spiritual Quixote, and engaging comic novel written in the mid-eighteenth century. But this life was essentially that of a rural parson. In exploring that life, Clarence Tracy allows us a detailed view of rural English society of the period as well as an appreciation of Graves’s writing.
As the second son of a family of landed gentry, Graves was raised with a well-defined sense of his position in society but no income with which to sustain it. He found his place as a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, from which vantage point his future looked bright. But he fell in love with a young woman, Lucy Bartholomew, and secretly married for a few weeks before she before their first child. Marriage was forbidden to fellows of All Souls, and when G
