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Old Mr Rock a widower lives in a cottage with his granddaughter Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig Ted the goose and Alice the cat but an additional member threatens in the person of Sebastian Birt the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian spinsters the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker.
One sunny summer's morning the morning of the Founders' Day Ball as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy it is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage Henry Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts the suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an absolute mastery in the depiction of character he imbues this apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and superb comic effect.
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Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born in 1905 near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become managing director of an engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926) was written whilst he was still at school and published whilst he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the London Fire Brigade. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, and a memoir, Pack My Bag. Henry Green died in December 1973
