Jinny the Carrier

Jinny the Carrier
Israel Zangwill
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
Dear Mistress of Bassetts,
You and Audrey have so often proclaimed the need—in our world of sorrow and care—of a “bland” novel, defining it as one to be read when in bed with a sore throat, that as an adventurer in letters I have frequently felt tempted to write one for you. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and seemed perversely to have turned against novels altogether, perhaps because I had been labelled “novelist,” as though one had set up a factory. (Two a year is, I believe, the correct output.) However, here is a novel at last—my first this century—and there is a further reason for presuming to associate you with it, because it is largely from the vantage-point of your Essex homestead that I have, during the past twenty years, absorbed the landscape, character, and dialect which finally insisted on finding expression, first in a little play, and now in this elaborate canvas. How often have I passed over High Field and seen the opulent valley—tilth and pasture and ancient country seats—stretching before me like a great poem, with its glint of winding water, and the exquisite blue of its distances, and Bassetts awaiting me below, snuggling under its mellow moss-stained tiles, a true English home of “plain living and high thinking,” and latterly of the rural Muse! I can only hope that some breath of the inspiration which has emanated from Bassetts in these latter days, and which has set its picturesquely clad poetesses turning rhymes as enthusiastically as clods, and weaving rondels as happily as they bound the sheaves, has been wafted over these more prosaic pages—something of that “wood-magic” which your granddaughter—soul of the idyllic band—has got into her song of your surroundings.
The glint of blue where the estuary flows,
Or a shimmering mist o’er the vale’s green and gold:
A little grey church which ’mid willow-trees shows;
A house on the hillside so good to behold